finding my place

I'm just back from a "Get Ready to Graduate" program on campus. Free pizza plus advice from the registrar's office, career services and the alumni association about winding up our legal education and succesfully scooting ourselves into careers. I ate my pizza and listened, feeling like a total outsider. Network, they say. Start your job search now, they say. Go to social gatherings, they say. Learn to shmooze with lawyers, they say. Volunteer, they say. Scour your brain for possible contacts, then contact them, they say. Polish your resume, they say. This will be the most difficult, complicated job search you ever experience, they say. At least they're being honest.

I don't feel inspired by any of this, although, I'm sure I'm not alone. Nobody else in that room was probably thrilled at the thought of "marketing yourself" or mingling with lawyers at an upcoming Bar social event. ("There will be 30 other Lewis and Clark students there," warned Libby of career services, who is really awesome, "It will be very tempting just to huddle up with them. Please make it a point to talk to people you *don't* *know*")

I sat and listened with my blank stare and my blank heart and I thought back to last night. SK and I went to an open forum on the Middle East conflict sponsored by the Process Work Institute. Representatives from Palestine, Israel and a woman from an unaffiliated peace and justice organization spoke briefly about the issues from their perspectives and the floor was then opened to the audience to ask questions or share feelings. I was moved by the heartfulness of the speakers and most of the commenters and moved, of course, by the way Process Work frames and holds the issues. This framing helped the dialogue to flow and deepen rather than becoming polarized and stuck.

I have loved my law school training. I have loved the access to power my education has brought me. I have loved the way this type of rigorous study has trained my mind to think logically, to notice detail, to persist, to look at the micro and the macro at the same time, to reason. Bojack used to say in Tax Class, "No one goes to law school to become a better person," and I always disagreed in my heart, because I knew I was learning how to be a better, smarter, more thoughtful, more responsible person.

And it turns out, that better person that I've been becoming isn't done becoming yet. That better person doesn't want to stop at graduation, go to Bar socials, make connections, get a job in town at a firm, get my laptop and my Blackberry (hi Waspy), do the whole thing. It just doesn't move me. It doesn't call me. Who does it call, really? Who feels a deep, spiritual pull to work at a law firm? Probably no one.

So, as I look back and forth between the things that really pull me (like the forum last night) and the things that really don't (like the career services presentation), I have to decide whether I am a person who will move towards the pull rather than the more known, more expected career path. I have to ask what I will give up by not pursuing the career path and what I will gain by following the pull. And if I decide to follow the pull, I have to figure out *how* -- because there is no career services department and no awesome Libby to chart my course and give me advice. It's just me. And SK. Both in the same boat, really, floating on an open sea, waiting to catch sight of some guiding star so we know which way to steer. (And hoping we don't hit a giant ice-berg made of cheese because this last bit is really cheesey, but I can't help it, it's true.)