CELL Blog | Center for Engaged Learning in the Law

So a few things if you are an occassional or first time visitor.

1) At the bottom of each blog post is a link that says comments. You can find some good responses from classmates, the occassional professor, and visitors. Also, you can leave your comments, serious or sarcastic.

2) Additionally, CELL is actively seeking contributors. If you have some comments you would like to make about law school, life in general, or living in Greensboro, e-mail me at mgroves@elon.edu so that I can establish you as a contributor and have you start posting. You DO NOT need to be a student or even in the Elon community, so long as you are somehow related to the legal field. Again, the posts can be serious/not serious so long as they are loosely related to law and clear of (most) any profanity.

Forward any questions to the above e-mail…

Matt

In the intervals of spare time we have between days of studying for exams, hopefully you are aware that the year is winding down.  There are less than 2 weeks to Christmas, and less than 3 to New Year’s 2010.  Rather than looking forward to decide where I will be spending your New Year’s Eve, I prefer to look backwards to see where the year started and how much progress has been made for 2009.  Did I make this year better than the last?  Most people don’t keep track of things like this.   As we get older, years tend to blend together, until we can’t remember which year I took that vacation.  Suddenly, while paying at the gas station you look down and see that you can’t buy cigarettes unless you were born before this day in 1991.  1991?  Didn’t that say 1984 two weeks ago?  The point I want to make here is to take time to ensure that every year counts.  Don’t just say you’re going to do it, as you will when you loosely make resolutions in three weeks.  Actually find quantifiable standards to mark your progress towards making yourself who you want to be so that law school doesn’t turn out to be a 3 year black out on your life’s itenerary. 

Hemingway said there were three marks of a man:  writing a novel, fighting a bull, and fathering a son.  Now, certainly he didn’t do these things every year, but there was a goal, a clear path to that goal, and a time frame for accomplishment.  To make a well rounded person he included a serious intellectual, physical, and emotional challenge (respectively).  Do something that makes you realize your own mortality so that you remeber that you are in fact, alive.  That can be lost in reading days, especially when your library is two floors underground. 

If you ever hesitate to seize an opportunity, consider the alternative.  Where will you be in 10 years if you monopolize your day with law school, get straight A’s throughout school, take a 150,000/year job with a large firm and work 70-80 hours a week to come home to an empty, albeit well decorated, condo to sleep wake up and start over again?  You can say “there’s always Vegas,” and then realize that that was 10 years ago.  Or you can heed Morgan Freeman, “get busy living, or get busy dying.”

“Nunc lento sonitu dicunt morieris…”