The past few years have given many of us, for better or for worse, a chance to ponder our own mortality.

The Attack

On an unassuming Friday afternoon in late November of 2019, I began to feel weird. I noticed I was anxious and unusually aware of my heartbeat. I chalked it up to a long week at work; I drank some wine with dinner and tried to relax and get a good night’s sleep. On Saturday morning I felt fine; we walked to the farmer’s market, saw friends, and played with the kids at the playground. It was only later in the day that I again became aware of my heartbeat. It felt like my heart was racing, working harder than usual, faster than usual, in a way that felt unfamiliar. I took some ibuprofen and went to bed early, but when I woke up at 5 am I felt exactly the same: anxious, heart racing, unfamiliar, weird.

Unfortunately, as with most maladies, if you Google “heart attack symptoms” there is little chance you’ll conclude all is well. Instead, you’ll discover that heart attack symptoms can include a racing heart, faintness, dizziness, chest pains, breathing difficulties, tightness in the chest, and anxiety. I stared out the window for a few moments, cataloging my perceived ailments while looking at the trees and the clouds, and recalled an article I once read about how the shorter life expectancy of men is partially explained by their failure to seek out appropriate medical care.

I woke up my wife. I told her I didn’t feel right, had some symptoms of a heart attack, and was going to drive myself (dumb) to the hospital to make sure everything was okay (smart). She was immediately wide awake, flanked by our two sleeping children and 4 months pregnant with our third. We embraced and I walked out into the cold pre-dawn light.

The drive to the hospital was short and uneventful. I still felt weird. Walking into the ER entrance and up to the desk made me feel weirder. They took my vitals and hooked me up to an ECG machine. I surveyed the various devices in the room, recognizing some from patent cases I had worked on. The ECG machine showed what appeared to be a normal heart beat. 

The doctor wandered in. No heart attack. My ECG and vitals looked fine. My blood pressure was high but dropped significantly after I was told I wasn’t having a heart attack. I was to follow up with a cardiologist and my general practitioner. The weirdness abated. 

I picked up donuts on the way home for the girls and that afternoon bought my wife two Christmas trees. 

The Recovery

After several days of taking it easy, I began to work my way through the medical system. Human hearts and bodies are monstrously complex, but even if a physical malady wasn’t apparent in those few minutes hooked up into an ECG machine, I had to believe that one was the culprit. 

Over the weeks and months, however, the doctors concluded that my heart and I were generally healthy. My cholesterol was a bit high and I could lose a few pounds. I still felt the urge to do something. Maybe it was the cholesterol? I decided to go vegan for a while and cut out all animal products from my diet. A plant-based diet is hardly a silver bullet cholesterol-wise, but it felt good to take action even if I knew I was still missing a key piece of the puzzle. (Plant-based Sam is a topic for another blog post.) 

I began telling select people about my experience. Eventually, someone suggested that I might have had a “panic attack.” Panic attacks can, apparently, present themselves much like a heart attack: anxiety, a racing heart, breathing difficulties, and tightness in the chest. Although they can be triggered by moments of acute stress, they can also occur somewhat randomly as a result of lifestyle stressors. 

Lifestyle stressors were easy to find: I was a big law litigation associate and family man, with two small children and a third on the way. Parenthood and big law arrived within the same two month span and entirely restructured my life. See, e.g., Chapter 160 (“Lauren’s Lasagna” and “Lucy’s Pasta and Tiny Cheese”). Even compared to attending law school while working full time, big law litigating-while-parenting was a challenge. And unlike law school, where your stress usually peaks during your first year, my litigating-while-parenting journey kept adding new complications: my first appellate brief, my first deposition, another child, my first oral hearing, my first trial, yet another child, etc. I have the most wonderful spouse and partner in parenthood, Jess, and many wonderful legal colleagues, but every once in a while the waves would all collide and I’d have to choose between being a bad husband and father, a bad colleague, or (through sleep-deprivation) a bad mammal. Too often it was a bit of all three.

Still, I felt like something was missing from my health picture. When the waves weren’t all colliding, I loved being a litigator. Chalking what happened up to litigating-while-parenting didn’t feel like an honest answer. Maybe it was just an inconvenient answer. I focused on taking care of myself and my family, delegating and managing my time at work, and giving myself space to process the world around me. 

That was about the time that the pandemic hit. 

The Pandemic

Much of the world was upended by the pandemic. My wife and I were privileged to be able to work remotely, reobtain childcare (eventually), find life-saving support from friends in various COVID-bubbles, and celebrate an extended network of family and friends that (mostly) took things seriously and have remained healthy. All that said, the complete shutdown of our lives concurrent with the birth of our son was and will remain an extraordinary moment. Parenting tiny humans during a global pandemic is a scar many of us will wear forever. 

Despite these obvious stresses and the slow descent into a new reality, something about the pandemic was … calming. I didn’t notice it at first, but the time window of what I worried about had shortened considerably. Expectations were lower. Everyone’s big, long term plans were thrown out the window, at least temporarily. Sort of like camping during a rainstorm; all you had to do was stay inside and pass the time to accomplish something important. 

Embracing this sense of groundlessness — of recognizing that you had little control over your life — was freeing. Instead of agonizing over what I could not control, I focused on the present. I wasn’t very stressed over COVID after the initial transition. I could follow the best practices and the rest was out of my control. Success was surviving, medically and financially, the next few years. 

Immediately before the pandemic, however, success had looked a lot more complicated.

The Conference

Way back in the summer of 2019, and several months before my trip to the ER, the law firm brought me and every other 5th year associate to its headquarters for a week-long “mid-level associates” retreat. We mingled, attended career development seminars, and talked to distinguished senior partners and alumni about their paths through the law. With one large and looming exception, it was a phenomenal event. That exception was the realization that there were around five times as many 5th year associates at the retreat as the number of associates that made partner the previous year (generally 9th or 10th years). 

Big law, by design, grinds a sea of talented associates into a smaller group of junior partners, who then manage, leverage, and grind the next group of talented associates using the same process (and are themselves managed by more senior partners). This model means that for every future junior partner in the group there were three or four mid-level associates destined for another path. Maybe that path meant joining a peer firm in need of a partner-track candidate, or maybe a smaller regional or boutique firm. Maybe it meant a governmental or in-house position. It could even lead to running a taco truck or a bed and breakfast. For 75-80% of the people in that room, however, it would not lead to a long term position at the firm. (This up-or-out attrition model is common for most big professional service firms.) And even those associates who were elevated to partners had new and significant responsibilities: they became junior management and had to oversee budgets, generate business, etc., all in addition to the day-to-day grind of being a lawyer and the pressure to maintain their position as partner. (That pressure can, in some cases, become unbearable.)

Every big law associate eventually dies: they are either reborn as a partner, leave big law, or collapse at their desk. What I came to realize was how tightly my identity was wound up with my big, fancy law firm job. The upcoming partnership shakeup messed with the assumptions underlying that identity: a successful professional, a solver of puzzles, and a provider for my family. I was scared of being put up for partner and failing, and having to retreat into some mundane “backup” job that did not challenge me. I was scared of making partner and having to take on ever more stress and responsibility, to the neglect of my health and family. And I was also scared of having to put myself out on the job market as some sort of presumed failure if I left before I was put up for partner. The uncertainty of it all messed with my confidence that I could provide support and security for my growing family, yet the ticking clock meant Sam the Associate was on borrowed time. 

Until the pandemic and its opportunity for self-reflection, I had no idea how deep that stress had taken root. It added a new meaning to wanting to do a good job with a brief or a deposition. It changed the tenor of building new professional relationships or taking on new projects. And it had put an extra, unnoticed focus on a high profile matter I had been working on during that fateful week in November of 2019.

The Epitaph

It would be a bit reductive to conclude that the fear of not-making-partner gave me a panic attack. But stress can come from a variety of sources, including a fear of professional change. The fear that however well I was making “it” work now would further fall apart in a few years as part of this upcoming shakeup. I bottled that fear up, un-analyzed, and let it stew until it found its own, unexpected way out.

The panic attack (or whatever it was) in combination with the pandemic gave me an opportunity to think about my own personal and professional mortality. I thought about how, rather than deciding where I wanted to go with my career, I had allowed myself to follow the default path set by the firm. The pressure of that path grew and grew until it was taken away, temporarily, by the pandemic’s shift of focus from long-term to short-term success. I thought about how I had avoided figuring out what long-term personal success looked like. Success as a husband and father, as a professional, and as a mammal. Whether that success involved being a litigator. Whether I wanted to work at a firm. Whether I wanted to even practice law. 

In the end, it’s embarrassing how much I had let one idea of professional success creep into my definition of personal success. I may never entirely untangle that mess. But I did manage to let go of the idea that partnership at my firm had any relation to my long-term personal success. It was just a job, one to be considered with all the other jobs. It wasn’t an issue of making it or failing, it was a choice between what I would do once Sam the Associate’s time was up. That changed perspective was valuable as the post-pandemic pace of litigation picked up and an interesting opportunity at a technology company landed in my lap. 

Sam the Associate might be dying, but what came next for Sam the Mammal was up to me.

1. Sam’s Tuna Mac

• Boxed Mac and Cheese 
• Can of Tuna 
• Vegetables; chef’s choice would be diced onion, carrot, jalapeno, and tomato, but whatever you have can, and should, be added
• Oil, butter, milk, cheese, hot sauce, salt, pepper (as desired)

1. Cook Mac and Cheese according to instructions; use pasta water for making the cheese if milk and butter are unavailable.
2. Sauté/simmer vegetables as desired in oil, butter, or water.
3. Combine pasta, tuna, and vegetables with extra cheese, butter, hot sauce, salt, and pepper (as desired).

We had just finished our second day of a three day backpacking trip through the woods of rural Pennsylvania. Too much beef jerky and trail mix for lunch and snacking meant we needed something substantial for dinner, so we began to make several boxes of mac and cheese. It was not particularly cold, but, due to our hunger and desire to pack lightly and bring our smaller stove, our filtered stream water-to-heat source ratio was way too high. We set the stove to full blast for 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour, and then more, and still our pot did not boil. 

We slowly became savages. Nothing mattered more than cooking this meal. We tried windbreaks and shielding the pot, but nothing worked. We eventually gave up on the stove and built a fire. A large, roaring fire, and we put the pot of water directly on the cinders and it boiled, oh it boiled. And then the pasta went in, and any cheese we had left, some random cans of tuna, and anything else we could find that could arguably fit within the framework of a pasta dish. And it was glorious, oh it was glorious, perhaps the most satisfying meal I have ever had. 

Every bowl of tuna mac I’ve had since that day echoes with the satisfaction of that meal. That few others enjoy this sweet ambrosia has only strengthened the intensely personal nature of this dish to me, and backpacker’s tuna mac quickly became my bachelor comfort food of choice. It brought me home when I left for college and later when I left for a job in DC.

2. Jess’s Pasta Without Peas

• 1 lb pasta (chef’s choice)
• 3 lemons (for zest and juice)
• 1-2 tbsp olive oil
• 1-2 cloves of garlic
• 1 cup of white wine for cooking and the rest for drinking
• Parmesan and red pepper flakes (as desired)
• Optional: mushrooms, asparagus, shrimp, chicken, etc. 
• Mandatory: no peas.

1. Put pasta water on to boil, mince the garlic, and zest the lemons. 
2. Once the pasta water is several minutes away from boiling, in a large skillet (medium high heat) add olive oil, garlic, lemon zest, and red pepper flakes (if desired), along with the mushrooms, asparagus, shrimp, chicken, etc.
3. Once the pasta water boils, add the pasta to the water. 
4. Cook the skillet for 2 more minutes, add 3 lemons worth of juice and a cup of white wine, cover, reduce heat, and let simmer. 
5. When the pasta is a minute from done, save some pasta water, drain the pasta, add the pasta to the skillet, stir, and cover for another minute or so. If it’s not saucy enough, add a little pasta water. 
6. Serve with Parmesan.

My wife Jess and I began dating in early 2009, and dinner parties became a frequent occurrence. Jess is a fabulous cook and is fluent in, among other things, a variety of delicious Italian pasta dishes. I ate and lived well. Sometime later in the summer, however, she made an accidental revelation: she had stopped including peas in her pasta dishes. Although once a regular addition, they had vanished.

[Other person]: [comment about adding peas to a dish]

Jess: No, Sam doesn’t like peas, so I leave them out. 

Me [overhearing]: …. what? I like peas. 

Jess: Oh, I noticed that you once had picked around them, so I figured you didn’t like them and stopped using them when cooking for you.

This was earth shattering for a variety of reasons. First, I love peas. Second, and although she loves peas too, she noticed a small presumed preference of mine and altered her recipes to make me happier. Third, I had heard about none of this. It all happened without my involvement and without a conversation or exploration of grievances. It was the tiniest little change yet it spoke volumes about her thoughtfulness and approach to reality and our relationship. I was speechless. 

I had fallen madly in love with her by that fall. 

3. Lauren’s Lasagna

1. Obtain employment at a large law firm.
2. Befriend a kick ass attorney named Lauren.
3. Receive a frozen lasagna from Lauren because your wife gave birth.
4. When the right moment comes, bake at 350 until done.

Two months into my new job as a big law litigator, my wife gave birth to our eldest daughter, Lucy. Three months later, I was scheduled to take the bar exam. My firm generously gave me eight weeks of paid leave to cover both events, so I used two weeks of leave when my daughter was born and intended to use the remainder in the lead up to the bar exam. 

This ended up being the right choice for the bar—I passed—but it meant for a rough transition back to work after my daughter was born. Our baby had yet-to-be-diagnosed reflux and would not sleep on her back in her crib; she only calmed down if she was physically on one of us. That combined poorly with a major work crunch as soon as I came back to work: each day I left for work at 8 am, came home at 7 pm, held the baby until 2 am so Jess could sleep laying down, and then slept until 7 am to start the loop again. 

By midway through the second week, which happened to be my birthday, we were destroyed. Although Jess had been excited to cook and celebrate with some semblance of normalcy, even if for an evening, the little one had been a fuss bucket and the day had gotten away from her. When I got home late after another long day, we both just looked at each other, defeated. 

But then we remembered the frozen lasagna from Lauren sitting in our freezer. We threw it in the oven, cleaned off the dining room table of all of the various baby crap that it had collected, opened a bottle of wine, and, for a brief moment, had a warm, delicious, and home-cooked meal together, all while the little one miraculously slept. 

That day was a turning point in our energies. Each day since then has been a bit easier, we’ve been a bit more confident as parents, and we’ve held ourselves to more reasonable standards in terms of what you can accomplish while also keeping your children alive. That day felt like hitting bottom, but we were saved by a bounce back up off of Lauren’s delicious, frozen lasagna. 

4. Lucy’s Pasta and Tiny Cheese

• Pasta (penne if possible, but not macaroni noodles)
• Butter
• All the Parmesan cheese (“tiny cheese”) you have. Shredded cheese (“medium cheese”) can sometimes be accepted. 

1. Cook pasta until it’s just on the other side of el dente, then drain. 
2. Mix with enough butter to prevent the pasta from sticking to itself. 
3. Serve with tiny cheese in a separate bowl. You will need more. 

Through a confluence of various work commitments and litigation schedules, in 2018 I was sent to Paris for two days of meetings the week of Thanksgiving. Sensing an opportunity to piggyback a family vacation off of my free airfare and hotel, I pushed my return trip back a few days and booked tickets for Jess and the girls to join me for the week. Jess would wrangle the girls for my two days of meetings and afterwards we’d enjoy a few adventure days as a family before flying home. 

That was the vision. The reality involved Jess traveling to a conference the week beforehand and me juggling both kids through what turned out to be one of the most stressful and busy work weeks of my life. We ran the girls around the airport before catching our first flight (to tire them out) only to run them again through the Reykjavik airport (to catch our connection to Paris), battled sleep deprivation, and Jess juggled the girls through museum closures, rain, and a broken stroller. 

Our first adventure day happened to be Lucy’s 4th birthday. We had breakfast chocolate croissants, went to the top of the Eiffel Tower, rode a carousel, and ate macarons at Ladurée on the Champs-Élysées. Jess and I even managed to snag a babysitter from a local work colleague and snuck away for an hour or two of wine and cheese at a cafe on the river Seine. After returning from dinner, I spent several more hours finishing a brief. (The ability to work remotely means that work won’t necessarily cancel your vacations, but also that you often have to work during your vacations.)

Traveling with children is wonderful and exhausting. They provide a way to experience places and things with fresh eyes and a new perspective, while also requiring constant supervision and mindfulness on top of the usual I’m-a-stranger-in-a-strange-land traveler mindfulness. Children also often refuse to eat anything that doesn’t look and taste exactly like what they’re used to. 

By mid-way through our second adventure day, this time at Versailles, we were approaching the limits of our frayed nerves and our now 4-year-old’s culinary good graces. We had also walked ourselves into a trap: the lunch rush had begun, we had insufficient snacks in our bag for a full family lunch, and every Versailles food option was woefully un-kid-friendly, with few tables, long lines, and unacceptable-to-Lucy lunch offerings. We made the choice to venture back outside into the gardens to look for a wind-sheltered picnic spot or a tourist trap cafe. We reached deep into the well of our creativity to keep spirits high but sensed an impending calamity. 

So imagine our delight to stumble onto La Petite Venise, an Italian restaurant nestled into a corner of the Versailles gardens. It was mostly empty and they quickly found us a table away from the only other patrons. They brought us wine and coffee and, more importantly, a large bowl of lightly buttered pasta with as much Parmesan cheese as desired for our eldest daughter. This remains Lucy’s comfort food, her “I’m at home and the world is alright” food, and we found it in Paris, and that made Paris the best city in the world. She was in heaven.

There are few moments as relaxing as when you can briefly stop entertaining and minding your child. Being allowed, however briefly, to turn off the part of your brain that minds your child is like putting down a heavy weight or sitting after a long day. We recharged, regrouped, and stuffed our bellies with Italian food, and then pushed back out into the world, ready for adventure.

In 2009, I was away from DC for a total of 17 weeks. I pulled this off by working remotely when possible and squeezing the theoretical maximum utility out of my vacation days. Each biweek required accounting for 80 hours of work, so working 60 hours one week meant taking the second week off required only 20 hours of leave. I worked like a madman, emptied my leave account, and saw the world.

In March of 2010, however, I accepted an offer to attend law school part-time for four years in DC. A month later, I agreed to move in with Jess, my then-girlfriend, while we were both traveling in Spain. I knew that my life would soon look unrecognizable, and had committed to a path largely centered in DC. I chose this path deliberately and after careful thought, but the anticipated stability was a source of consternation for a lifelong traveler.

In an attempt to make the most of my dwindling pre-law school freedom, I flew to Sweden in May of 2010 to meet up with my friend Dave, who was working on a clean energy project. It was a reunion for two travelers who had spent two months together backpacking through India as part of Dave’s around-the-world-in-9-months trip. We ate and drank our way through Stockholm, explored the countryside, and hiked to wave farms hiding near the coast.

The night before our big drive over and through the fjords to Bergen in Norway, we stayed at a hostel in Gothenburg, on the west coast of Sweden. Dave bought a bottle of aquavit and a deck of cards, and soon we made friends around a table in the main common area.

One traveler stood out. An American. A bit older and calmer than the others. Thin, with long hair and a steady gaze. He was in Gothenburg to wait for a friend so they could travel north and see the northern lights. He told remarkable stories. How he had sailed around the world. How he was preparing to motorcycle across Africa. We played cards and drank aquavit for hours.

Somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, during the dot-com boom, the technology company he founded was acquired and paid him out handsomely. He packed his bags and had been traveling ever since. He learned to sail, to repair a motorcycle, and to speak multiple languages, and had acquired a lifetime’s worth of stories. We were mesmerized.

He did not gloat. He was not proud. If anything, he seemed resigned. As if this whole thing was his second choice. As if he had seen something better and it had passed him by. This was just his path. He talked of the future as an unstructured expanse to be filled with the next grand adventure as I might talk of having to find a new apartment. He talked of loneliness. Of meeting his friends from back home and their wives and children. Of having no home, no plan, and a rotating cast of acquaintances who floated in and out of his life. He laughed when someone suggested that he was “drowning on freedom” but said nothing in response.

The next day Dave and I drove north along the coast into the forests, up into the hills, through the valleys, up higher and higher until we dove into the fjords, cutting through tunnels and over bridges. We stopped to look at waterfalls and eat hot dogs from Norwegian gas stations. After a foggy day in Bergen, we drove back along a different route and Dave dropped me off in Oslo to fly home.

A year and a half earlier, shortly before I punted on my law school applications for another year, and one month before my first date with Jess and the start of my trip to India, I documented three radically different visions for the year leading up to law school, partly inspired by Dave’s trip around the world. I named the document “Life Options”:

• Don’t Move Out and Don’t Quit Job: I would go to India with Dave for 1-2 months, return to DC, and travel as much as possible before starting school the next fall. But I couldn’t take a big trip, and paying rent on an empty room felt silly.
• Move Out and Don’t Quit Job: I wouldn’t need to pay rent while traveling, and my ability to work remotely meant I could work something out for the time between vacations before starting school.
• Move Out and Quit Job: I would have close to eight months and minimal expenses to see the world. As I noted in the document: “there may never be another time I can pull this off.”

In the end I didn’t file my law school applications that cycle, mooting the plans I had worked up. But the wanderlust that had inspired them remained, and inspired the 17 weeks of travel I managed in 2009. It also inspired the trip to Spain with Jess where we decided to move in together. And it whispered faint doubts into my ear as I sent off my deposit for law school and discussed moving in with Jess.

Which brings us back to Gothenburg, and the traveler.

I don’t believe in fate and I don’t believe in luck, but it was useful for me to have met that traveler in Gothenburg. Because he was someone who took his wanderlust to the logical conclusion: a life of constant travel. A life without a home. He was someone who, when given all the freedom and money he could manage, chose a path that focused on the short term to the exclusion of the long term. A life without roots.

I’ve always known that a life without travel is not the life for me, but the traveler showed me that a life with only travel might not be the life for me either. As is often the case, the ideal path is somewhere in the middle. And that realization was profoundly comforting as I invested my time and energy into building a career and a life and a home in DC.

When I left the traveler back in 2010, he was waiting to meet a friend so they could go see the northern lights. It took me more than seven years after that day in Gothenburg to see the lights myself.

This last September, my wife Jess and I watched the green lights dance across the sky through the window of our plane to Iceland, careful not to wake our two and a half year old daughter, Lucy, on her way to her fourth country bag. Once there, we helped her swim through the Blue Lagoon to find Icelandic mermaids and waterfalls, follow cats through elf gardens, and make “soup” in an empty coffee cup on the black sand beaches of Vik.

I will always have that itch, that wanderlust that makes me want to drive into the sunset or bag a new country. That itch has led me to some remarkable places. But I decided back in 2010 that it would not prevent me from building a career and a life that challenge me. From putting down roots. And that decision has led me to some remarkable places too.

I once met a man who drowned on freedom. I did not follow him.

“My wife and I are expecting a baby in November.”

This sentence came out of my mouth for the first time in the Spring of 2014. Like many phrases that change the world, the full weight of its meaning washed over me in ever increasing waves.

“My wife and I . . .”

One of my first reactions to the news of my impending fatherhood was to subconsciously rearrange my entire outlook on my marriage. Before our future child entered the picture, it was just Jess and me. Sure, we were married, but a childless marriage doesn’t look that different on a day-to-day basis from a stable, long-term relationship.

Once the child entered the picture, however, we suddenly became a “family,” a unit that required stewardship above and beyond the maintenance of a single relationship. My decision of what to do after law school took on a new dimension, and I spent most of a week calculating financial projections before I realized what was happening. The math was the same as before, but my role in the math had changed drastically: I was now part of a family with a future child. That required a variety of new spreadsheets.

“. . . a baby . . .”

A baby starts off as a concept. You can infer its existence via a test and some morning sickness, but, for a father especially, a baby resides on a transdimensional plane. Other than implication (and morning sickness), it does not yet interact with your world. Then you hear the heartbeat. And see the arms and legs kicking on the ultrasound. Over time you can even start to see the bump. Even after all that, our decision to keep the gender a surprise and to use the genderless nickname of “the Borg” kept a certain science-fictional quality to our future child. It certainly existed; the medical profession and Jess could attest to that. But the bump kept getting larger, and eventually the Borg started moving and kicking. Our transdimensional baby began interacting with reality in a way I could feel with my hand.

Our baby kicked my hand.

“. . . in November.”

Nine months is a long time. In between finding out we were expecting and the grand reveal, Jess and I each interviewed for and were offered new jobs, I graduated law school, we moved into a new house, and I quit my government job of nine years to try my hand in Big Law. Our lives were almost unrecognizable. All of this, to say nothing of the morning sickness, back pain, and false labor my wife endured.

Nine months is also a blink of an eye. We had books to read, trips to take, life to sort, all before everything would be flipped upside down. It felt like I barely had time to paint the baby’s room, assemble the crib, and meet our doula before I was racing to the hospital through rush hour traffic with a screaming wife beside me.

“. . . expecting . . .”

As the months marched on and the baby became more and more real, the implication of the word “expecting” became sometimes overpowering. I’ve read books and my fair share of the Internet, and throughout my life I’ve known several families who’ve suffered the heartbreak of a miscarriage or stillbirth. There’s no way around it. Pregnancy isn’t a sure thing. You can paint the baby’s room, assemble the crib, and still, in the back of your head, know there’s a chance that . . . . I can’t even write it, because it hurts my heart to even think of it. But it’s there.

I’ve always tried to avoid ever blindly assuming the positive outcome. Whether it’s playing a board game or taking the bar exam, I focus on the set of likely possibilities and mentally prepare for each one. Sometimes those possibilities are heartbreaking. But it’s your job to shoulder them as an adult.

You shoulder them when buying seemingly endless amounts of stuff, and moving into a bigger house to have more room for the baby. You shoulder them through the weeks of fruitless false labor. You shoulder them through hours and hours of actual labor and pain, your strong and amazing wife’s eyes pleading with you to make it stop. When the labor stops progressing and they bring up the idea of a c-section, you tell her “Baby, it’s going to be okay, I promise you, it’s going to be okay.” When the baby’s heart rate drops and it turns into an emergency c-section, you hold her hand and caress her hair behind the screen, trying with every ounce of your being to project the cool calm center of the universe you promised yourself you’d be.

And then the baby’s out. She’s a girl, and everyone’s cheering. A little baby girl, with ten fingers and ten toes and squinty little eyes, screaming with every ounce of her being, and she’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen in the world. And all the stoicism and planning and pretending to know what you’re doing pours out of you through giant streaming tears while sitting alone the next day on a couch in a darkened waiting room because you went to take a walk and everything hit you like an exploding star of joy and you sat down and cried and cried because you realized you were the luckiest man who had ever lived.

Poetry and songs have a reflective quality; we find meaning in them based on where we are and what is happening around us. While I’m not sure where I first found it, the following Stephen Crane poem has been the most reflective series of lines I have ever encountered:

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
“It is futile,” said,
“You can never –“

“You lie,” he cried,
And ran on.

When I read this poem in high school, I was the narrator, the pragmatist, the rational observer. I saw the world for what it was, is, and always would be. Surrounded by silliness in high school, I worked minimum wage jobs with coworkers at various points on the path to self destruction or mediocrity. To high school Sam, the narrator was the sympathetic party; his insight into reality could prevent the pointless tribulations of others if only they’d listen.

When I read this poem as I was applying to law school, I was the horizon pursuer, the poet, the irrational chaser. I rejected the nihilism of my early patent office days. Sitting in a comfortable chair and nitpicking everyone else’s achievements and delusions was no way to experience the world. To future law student Sam, the chaser was the sympathetic party. Even if all you did was chase, that was a source of meaning in and of itself. Happiness is doing, not getting what you want.

When I read this poem more recently, I was both. Everyone was both. In every direction, people chasing and others rationally tearing them down. Every decision had consequences. Nothing was clear cut. Move to the suburbs and raise a family? You’re crazy to give up your independence. Stay in the city and dive into your career? You’ll look back and regret the life you never started. Drop it all and give in to the wanderlust? You’ll give up your friends, your career, and your life for a handful of expensive stories. Cling to your reality with all of your strength? It’ll change anyway, and those stories you’ll never have are cheaper than the regret of not having them. Everyone searching for an adventure, a challenge, a dream. And everyone else out to validate their dream, their challenge, their adventure. None of it wrong, and yet none of it right.

Each of these readings was a reflection of a moment. In high school I was slowly realizing that I did not belong in rural Pennsylvania. In considering law school I was realizing that my career path was no longer exciting. More recently, the post law school expanse of opportunities stretches out before me with countless options. All of them with upsides. And all of them with downsides.

Some days I chase the horizon. Some days I stand my ground. And some days the world is too big to fit inside my head.