Baccalaureate and cultivating your community and cultivating others

On this second point of cultivating others, I would like to tell you briefly of a person for whom friends and colleagues are a central component of her life. She is my daughter, Sydney, and she celebrates her 23rd birthday today. Though she is a few years younger than you, she inhabits the same experiential world as you do. She was almost going to go to law school, but decided at the last minute to move from Eugene, OR to Manhattan to try to find her fortune there in the magazine industry. I love her and I respect her, and I respect her most of all because she is utterly committed to people. She assiduously writes emails, phones people, invites others to visit her in NYC (admittedly not an easy invitation to turn down for her Oregon friends), celebrates their worlds and brings them into her's. She is upbeat and understanding, sympathetically inclined to embrace another's construal of the world and wanting to do so in the context of a life filled with friends and fun and exploration. I know that the time she spends now cultivating others will yield a plentiful harvest--not only now, but especially in the future. So, take the time to develop the connections you need--in family, and friends and colleagues. As the African proverb says, "Friends are so important that you should hold onto them with both hands."

III. Cultivating Your Community

Finally, you make a life for yourself by cultivating your community and your place within it. Well, you will have a number of communities that help define you, but I want to refer here to the legal and geographical communities of which you are a part. One of the ways you can take pride in the fact that you are a lawyer is to participate in the life of the law beyond the cases that you do. There are ample opportunities for you to try to fit in...from service on the Board of Governors to volunteering for pro bono cases to finding a niche in the countless committees and tasks that are available to us. I served for five years on the Board of the US District Court of Oregon Historical Society in Portland, and though I felt I rendered valuable service, I derived far more from the continuing connection with people than I ever thought I would.

But, also, take care to cultivate your geographical community. America is in need of lawyers now in its public life. Why do I say that? Because lawyers bring to the table certain skills, both in process and substance, that most other people do not have and which, when absent, are sorely missed. For example, I have mentioned on another occasion that one of the things you might consider if you don't have work is to volunteer to serve on the Board of a private non-profit corporation. They are all around you and they are ALWAYS looking for board members. Then, volunteer to take minutes. One thing you have learned in law school is how to outline, and to present an outline in a cogent fashion. Do you realize that about 90% of America CANNOT do that? Within a year of your volunteering to help others, they will be calling on you for your legal expertise.

This is only one way, however, that lawyers can help the communities in which they are a part. You also bring with you certain assumptions about process that are the TRUE assumptions--and they are assumptions that most people don't understand. That is, you understand that when a public body is confronted with a choice or a problem, the FIRST thing you do is not scream or go to the media or panic but you ask, "Is there a policy that deals with this issue? Is it covered in our bylaws? Is it something on which there is precedent? Is there a statutory or administrative law principle that is in play here?" That is, you have been trained to think in terms of process to such an extent that you often can defuse difficult situations simply because you know there must be some authoritative guidance somewhere that can help you out in your current situation.

When you engage in community life, whether it is in service on boards or in elected office or other volunteer work, you will discover that you meet a lot of people who either try to provoke crises or think that they loom around every corner that you face. I, for one, think they are mistaken. There are true crises in national and community life, to be sure, but they really are not that frequent. The skills needed for communities to be strong are those which you as lawyers (future lawyers) have: deliberative thinking, asking about which authority applies to a situation, crafting language that takes all points of view into consideration, taking minutes of what is done, reporting on it to the body that requires the report. You know how to depersonalize an issue that others may want to make personal. And that, friends, is a very valuable skill.

Conclusion

After hearing these things from me, you might be tempted to ask, "Well, how now do I have time to make a living?" Don't worry. You will. I am more concerned, however, with ways you choose to make a life. We will be proud of you for your achievements in law that will come, to be sure. Some of you will have your name in lights in the future. Certainly the development office will find you well before that. But I will be more interested in how you are making your life, how you are not simply "juggling" (the au courant phrase) the various aspects of your life, but how you think of what you are doing. Are you cultivating yourself? Others? Your communities? By diligent effort in doing this, you will probably find the thing that most gives you joy. And if you do that, you will be a blessed person.

And, don't forget to keep in touch.

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