Heart and Soul

Okay, so stay with me here, but something occurred to me today, and it's sort of revolutionary.

When you put your heart and soul into something, it's hard to leave it behind. You might role your eyes or say "duh" but hear me out, if you will.

My friend Maria and I have been exchanging emails for the past few days. (Aside...surprise!!! She and I met on our first day of orientation in law school. We really hit it off. I personally think she's amazing. She's a mother of three, and decided in her thirties to finish a degree. So she completed her undergrad work and then continued on with her plan to go to law school. She's awesome!) Back to the story... she's graduating in May. So she asks me if it is weird to feel sad about law school ending.

To which I say: No, Maria, it isn't weird at all.

But I couldn't have said why until I responded to her question. It got me thinking about what law school was, really. It was, for me, three years of hard work. Three years of pouring myself into books and outlines and memorization. There were days when I didn't see daylight, literally. I'd leave for school early, when the sun might have been poking it's head up over the horizon. And then I'd leave long after it went down. Twelve hour days of working. And then there was the endless reading, the minutia of detail detail detail. Thousands of pages a semester. Not to mention the papers for writing courses or the hundreds of pages of outlines. Of course, first year comes with the pressure of being called on...not that it doesn't happen second or third year. But by then you are just over it. Still, being grilled for forty minutes in civil procedures is humiliating and probably psychologically damaging. Maybe. But then maybe it's good for your character.

One might think that it would be easy to say good-bye to, and there were things that were easy to let go.

Like finals. That was just two to three weeks of pure torture. Long hours of studying and memorizing. Four hour exams spent typing like a mad person. It was draining. I so do NOT miss that.

But I do miss the learning and the growth and giving something everything you have. Leaving it all out there and knowing you did the best you could, even if you get a C sometimes.

How can you not miss something like that? I gave it my best, at least most of the time. So I do miss it.

It's also given me some food for thought. I want something in my life like that again. I want something that I feel strongly about doing...something that I can say I gave my best, poured myself out into it, gave my heart to it. So that when I have to leave it behind I can truly say that I'm sad to let it go, the good parts and the bad both, because I left it all on the table.