When you're listless, use your hands and body to create joy

I feel most confused in the times in which I am asked to restrain myself physically.

Coincidentally, the life of a law student requires a lot of this.  To succeed, we are to sit, read, listen, "think creatively" (code for sit and read), and write.  If we're lucky, we articulate our thoughts to our superiors.  In rare circumstances, these superiors listen, offer thoughts, and allow us an opportunity to repeat the process.

During such times, I liken myself to a ballerina.  The most exhilarating periods of my life are those in which I've thrown myself completely into a pursuit.  In college, after I retired the idea of ever making it to the first few stands of any orchestra, I viewed my violin the same way I had when I first found it: as a chance to better myself.  Each piece I encountered was an opportunity to make music, irrespective of its challenges, or seeming lack thereof.  I found peace in the dingy basement of Hill Hall, drilling measures for hours, not for myself, or for any teacher, or for any performance, but just for the music itself.  I'd walk a mile and a half home with my violin on my back, the tips of my fingers sore, and a sense of accomplishment.

The same went for Chinese.  I did not study Chinese for any kind of career advancement.  I studied it because it was so foreign to my ears that I wanted to bend to its will.  I wanted to know what it was to make sounds by moving my tongue in ways it never had before and to be understood while doing so.  I wanted for the phonetics that seemed so ancient to become intelligible words.  I sat in wonderment when, after a few years of study, those phonetics became morphemes.  They resonated with me.  In my entire time in college, I never viewed this as a chore.  I sharpened my pencil, or wet my brush, or put on my headphones, and practiced.  Every day.  With joy!  Each poem or chengyu I carried like little arrows in a quiver.  When I first looked out over my classmates in my super section of law school, I couldn't help but think to myself, 三人行，必有我师焉.  I was satisfied.

The funny thing about law school, though, is that, though I have hundred-page piles of notes from each course I've taken, my contribution to this field will be negligible for a number of years.  Such is the life of a law student; we are essentially apprentices prior to bar passage (with rare circumstances in which students win habeas petitions through clinics, God bless you all).

During the spring of my 1L year of law school, I had difficulty treating case briefs in the same way as I had drilling Chinese.  Learning Chinese was an immediate reward.  Uttering sentences to one another with mutual intelligibility, creating masterful translations (which I can't say I ever really accomplished), and communicating one's true feelings; these are all experiences within themselves.  They are their own reward, though they are a part of your journey (please excuse my use of such a cliched term) towards command of language.

In law, I could not care less about briefing cases.  Find me an attorney who likes to brief cases and I will call her a hamster on a wheel.  Setting aside monumental cases in which Judge Cardozo decides he will make up the law to suit his ends, briefing cases is typically not an intrinsically rewarding activity.  

No, early on, I wanted a client.  I wanted to brief cases for someone.  I wanted to advocate, to set deal terms, to persuade, to add value.

Instead, I found myself spending my free time (all thirty minutes of it each week) doing watercolors and memorizing rap lyrics.  I worked on my 5K time and cooked elaborate dishes for my friends.  I designed quilt projects and sometimes even busted out my sewing machine.

I'm self aware, but not enough so that I understood what was happening.  Going to bed one evening after having tried my hand at painting a goldfinch (it was horrible), I wondered why I felt more satisfied than I had in weeks.

It wasn't from any lack of interest in law.  I was absolutely not about to drop out of school to apply to Cal Arts.  I loved my classes and professors, and wanted to do well.  No, upon reflection, it was simply that my physical self was so thirsty.  I asked myself, in the past few years, how often had I put my hand to paper for any purpose other than writing checks or jotting down notes?

I believed in college that to live a balanced life, we ought to pursue what I thought of as a "humbling activity."  We should always be reminded, I thought, that we can be better.

Turns out, my American Studies friend would tell me one day that this is very much the Ethnically Presbyterian part of me speaking.  

A few years of living like that resulted in my exhaustion.  Someone once laughed at my stating that I kept up with handball to remind myself that there are things I'm very bad at.  "LIFE is a humbling activity," she scoffed.  Maybe she was right, I thought.  Do things you enjoy.  Life is short and you could die tomorrow.  Show the world what you can do and forget the rest.

Now, I don't think that treating life as a humbling activity is a great attitude.  Absolutely, we are all specks in a giant universe, but life is more random than humbling.  The things you would never imagine happening will happen.  The people who you thought were long gone will come back to you.  And those whom you thought would be there with you forever will wither away... on purpose sometimes!  Sometimes they will die without warning.  But life is also a beautiful mystery that unfolds in the funniest ways.  It's a dance we learn to ponder at sundown and follow again at sunrise.  These days, I am more likely to laugh at the universe than anything.  When my niece turns five, I envision telling her that, if I've learned anything for sure yet (debatable), it's that this world will amaze you in what it presents you with.

Still, I often spend my evenings attempting to bring grace to poses that are so beyond what my body can currently accomplish.  Yoga was first sold to me when an instructor told us, "We do not do yoga.  We practice.  Each day we come to the mat, we remind ourselves that there is always something to work on."  Now you're talking, I thought. 

Why is this working for me, where handball didn't?  Yoga, painting, whatever; why is this more enriching than soul crushing?

Because, this time, I'm not using my hands to discipline myself.  Though what I do outside of the law does require patience, these activities welcome failure.  I enter the studio completely content with the idea that I am the worst person there, and that I may always be the worst person there.  You know why?  Because this isn't my job.  I am just producing something and trying not to hurt myself.  My art is not who I am, nor is it a reminder of who I am not.  It just is what it is.  It is just a tangible form of expression.  It is a production, for better or worse.  As is each asana or run.  Though I attempt to execute any project with intention, sometimes, my intention is merely to produce.  

Though our ambitions often remind us that we're human, our bodies remind us that we're animals.  Our tendency to create is not distinct to our species.  It's been instilled in us through millions of years.

It feels good.