Day 39: Facing the Right Direction
One of the things I often struggle in being a professor is feeling like a jack of all trades and master of none. Like many professors at research universities, my job description has three parts of roughly equal weight: teaching, scholarship (meaning research and writing), and service. For me, the teaching part also gets split because I teach a law clinic, with real clients, as well as traditional doctrinal law classes.
today, a typical Day
Today, for example, I spent the first few hours researching the life of a man who worked in the State Department in the early 20th century and helped shape many of the immigration laws our clinic works with today. Researching his life and times is an bottomless well - I could pull up the bucket a million times and it would never be dry. The biographers I admire - Doris Kearns Goodwin, Robert Caro, T.J. Stiles - do nothing but draw from such wells, all day, and I’m in awe of the worlds they (re)create.
But I have to stop, because clients are calling, anxious about the inexplicably long wait times before the immigration agencies, and the law students who will soon be their main point of contact haven’t started classes yet. At the same time, I’m preparing for those first classes, organizing documents and uploading materials so that the students can clearly see the process step one, step two, etcetera.
Two Ways of Facing in Work
This evening while working out, I listened to an episode of the podcast 3 Books, hosted by Neil Pasricha (and, in this case, his wife Leslie Richardson) and their guest, author and researcher Brené Brown.
One topic that quickly surfaced was the difference between Brown’s work and that of her husband, pediatrician Steve Alley. Richardson, a middle school teacher in an inner-city school, said she deeply values the immediate, private, one-on-one nature of her work but sometimes feels pulled into the more public-facing work of her writer/podcaster husband.
Brown said that she had “pushed really hard for about a year” for her husband to do public work with her. Eventually, she realized that she wasn’t really inviting her husband into her work for his sake but rather reacting to “feeling so alone in what I do.” Brown described speaking to enormous crowds, and then being rushed off stage surrounded by security and ushered into a private limo that takes her directly to the airport. Eventually, she realized that it would be a loss to the world if her husband left his work in medical clinics serving low-income communities, work that she referred to as “hard work on the edges of love.”
Juggling, A Gift
This conversation was a wake-up call I needed today. I realized that, as a professor, I am blessed to have both the public-facing work of Brown and Pasricha, sharing ideas with the world at large, and immediate, one-on-one work with immigration clinic clients and the students who share my eagerness to serve them, even sometimes at real personal cost to themselves.
Because my work is divided between these two ways of serving, I will likely never reach the large audiences that Brown and Pasricha have, nor impact as many individuals in life-changing ways as devoted servants like Richardson and Alley. But I have the satisfaction of serving in both ways nearly every day.
Facing Ourselves
This podcast reminded me that each of us has a balance to strike in how we face the world. In this podcast, Richardson said that she now sees full-time parents struggling with this, as InstaGram has turned even the most private-facing of vocations into potential material for public consumption, if one chooses.
This conversation among famous people ended up, ironically, being a very honest reckoning with the limits of public impact and a celebration of the intimate. Brown said her early research with survivors of extreme loss and trauma had helped her keep her bearings in fame. In that research, the thing that survivors mourned over and over, she said, was the loss of the ordinary - the everyday moments with the lost loved one that they will never know again. She said she vowed then never to forget to value the ordinary moments while being too busy chasing the extraordinary ones.
Ultimately, each of us has to choose which way to face in our work - the lonely impact of the outward, the tiny intimacy of the inward, or (like me) some semi-chaotic dance between the two.
Coming to this realization today reminded of something a wise friend once said to me. Complaining of a rough patch I was going through in life, I said, “I just don’t know which way to turn.” He answered, “When you don’t know which way to turn, maybe it means you’re facing the right direction.”