From Chapter Six: THE Time-Out Practice

[E]verybody needs a place to retreat to regularly in order to maintain a sense of identity and connection to the larger world. But many lawyers see such breaks as an impossible luxury. Perhaps that's because they don't realize the restrictions they put on themselves. These retreats needn't take a lot of time for you to get a lot from them. Like mindfulness practice, it's much less about how long you do it than how you do it; your intent and the quality of your presence make all the difference. And time-outs are amenable to creativity, to personalizing. In fact, the more you tailor your retreat--let's call it your Walden, in honor of Henry David Thoreau, that great connoisseur of solitude--in order to meet your own needs and idiosyncracies, the more you'll get out of it.

If, in your busy legal career, your Walden becomes as hard to find as Waldo is in those children's books in which the bespectacled young fellow is hiding somewhere on each cluttered page, then it's time to slow down and take stock of the situation. Slowness allows us to get some perspective. And, according to novelist Milan Kundera, it beckons memory; the faster we move, the less we remember of what matters to us.

Think about it. You're walking down the street, and something touches off a memory. But it's just off on the periphery of consciousness, hard to discern, alluring but evasive. You want to capture it, bring it back to life in the moment. What do you do? Without even thinking, you slow your pace. It's what we all do, unconsciously. It helps you turn inward so that you can remember.

Maybe, just maybe, it's your Walden calling you back. To the steam room, the ceramic studio, or a nearby caf; to the sea, or just to a bench in the park.

Wherever it is, going there is hardly a luxury. It's like the air you breathe (though you may have held your breath for a long, long time). It's a portal. An opening to the terrain of your mothballed dreams, a chance to get the long view of your life, to see it whole and understand where your legal career fits into a much larger picture than you acknowledge day to day.

The Pain of Failing to Reflect

Over the past twenty-five years, the author and speaker Richard Leider made a habit of interviewing people who had retired from successful and distinguished careers with leading companies. Having interviewed more than one thousand of these people, he found that, practically without exception, they say the same things about their lives and what they've learned about living.

First, they say that if they could live their lives over again, they would be more reflective. "They got so caught up in the doing, that they missed the meaning," Leider has written. "They overwhelmingly wished they had stopped at regular intervals to look at the big picture."

This suggests that the natural rhythm of life--the most satisfying rhythm--is one built upon some variant of the action-reflection-action pattern, tailored to fit each individual's unique circumstances. It's safe to say that these days, such rhythms tend to get subverted by the sheer momentum of events and by the often unexamined assumption that doing things is the sole measure of our lives.

When you're a lawyer, doing things--that is, getting things done--consumes most of your time. You set goals and you achieve them; problem solved, hours billed. That's well and good, but it is time to direct more of your attention to accomplishing a new goal: finding a rhythm based on both action and reflection that works for you, so that you don't miss out on much of what is good and nourishing in your practice and in your life.

(Chapter includes stories of lawyers who take time-outs regularly, plus tips/suggestions on how to integrate the Time Out Practice into your life.)