Time

You run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking

Racing around to come up behind you again

The sun is the same, in a relative way, but you're older

Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time

Plans that either come to naught, or half a page of scribbled lines

Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way

The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say

-Roger Waters

There are so many ways that a lifetime practicing law damages a person. The sedentary nature of the gig, sitting at a desk or a conference table or counsel table at trial, waiting for that DVT to render you speechless or dead. The constant bickering and conflict. The left brain wrestling the poor creative right into submission, logic and analytical reasoning choking the joy and color out of life.

But the worst thing, the very worst thing, is how it poisons your relationship with the concept of time.

I read with a jaundiced smile a passage in a book I recently finished, in which an Italian physicist explained that time doesn't actually exist, that it's a human conception to make sense of our place in reality.

Maybe so, but it's real enough in my life. Six minute increments. All lawyers live in six minute increments. $47.50 each, at my overpriced season of selling myself.

Whenever I'm not billing, I'm stealing from myself. That 1.2 on the golf course yesterday after work? Peg and I rode in our cart bathed in brilliant late afternoon sunshine, gentle breeze rustling the trees beside the tee box, discussing how golf at the CCC is a bargain at only $13 for nine holes.

But in reality, it's over $500. I could've been billing, dictating a letter or reading documents produced in discovery or talking on the phone. That thought kept drifting back into my consciousness.

This blog? Maybe $350 a day.

So I wince at every nonbillable event that intrudes on my day. This summer I'm trying to complete my thirty hours of CLE before starting the LLM program at NYU. This means, in practice, finding streaming presentations that comply with Florida's continuing ed requirements. But I can't really afford to give away that much time, so for much of it the video is streaming onscreen while I work on something else, turning nonbillable time into cash.

Exercise is expensive because I haven't figured out how to lift or run and charge someone for the time. Then again, not exercising and getting fat or having a stroke is pretty costly.

I've never taken a lunch, beyond maybe wolfing down a sandwich at my desk or showing up every couple months for my weekly Kiwanis Club meeting. That hour is too valuable for a leisurely meal.

There's a whole laundry list of nonbillable things crying out for my attention, all sitting half-completed not out of sloth, but just the opposite. My application to get into the VA system now that the old bod is starting to wear out from, to some degree, those years in the cockpit. Drafting a business plan for the farm and renting the Cliff. Filling out the rental notice to send to the COA up there so we can rent without running afoul of the rules.

Actually, I have these little lists in the margins of my legal pads, ever growing as I think of things I haven't gotten around to starting or completing. Making note of the task feels like progress, but it's not.

This time obsession has gotten worse since P and I married. For most of my career I was, to the detriment of my boys, okay with working until 7 or 7:30 on weeknights, and half a day on Saturday. That's just what lawyers do, and I knew that opposing counsel sat in his or her office at the same time, plotting my defeat. If I ever thought of slowing down, I'd start losing, and soon I'd be out of business. That fear made the billable hours flow.

Now P gets home around four, and I start trying to figure out how to turn off the meter as soon as she comes around the corner into my office here in Corning, or texts me when I'm in the office in PC that she's leaving the surgery center. If she's home, I want to be with her. We don't have forever, you know.

But the work doesn't slow or stop because my priorities have changed, and there's still that nagging sense that if it's daylight and I'm not at my desk, I'm spending money just by spending time not billing.

So I'm compelled to return to the Sisyphean task of grinding out another six or seven billable hours while juggling all the nonbillable stuff that elbows into my day. Peg will be home before I know it, and this rock isn't going to push itself up that hill.