I'm in my first semester of law school. It's a lot of reading and a lot of pressure. Week after week, you're thrown into a torrent of new information, with little to no time to collect your thoughts and piece the information together. The big picture is miles away. Even as someone who loves reading (I can't believe I ever took reading fiction for granted), the amount of information is concerning, mainly because your entire grade for most classes rests on one final exam. I'm actually procrastinating my case brief on Baker v. Howard County Hunt (1936) for Property to write this writeup right now.
Well, it's currently week 6, and despite everything I just mentioned, I feel like I'm doing okay so far. Situations like these can be solved with a commensurate amount of
elbow grease, and that's all the salvation I need to get through them.
Class is usually a dismaying experience for one specific reason: the more the professor speaks, the more information you need to remember and internalize for the final.
But sometimes class helps. I had Torts this week, and at the end of Tuesday's class, my professor set aside the index cards he uses for cold calling and asked us to shut our eyes.
Okay, stick around one moment. Can everyone just close their eyes?
I sort of expected a joke here. There were a few scattered giggles. Our eyes were closed for a few seconds until he spoke again:
You are lying down. You can feel the sun's rays gently hitting your face, a slight rocking motion, the sound of waves crashing on a distant shore.
You open your eyes (but don't open them in real life). You see clouds overhead. You're on a small sailing raft. You look around, and the ocean stretches before you. There's some destination you're headed to, shrouded in some clouds and fog. You can't quite make it out.
You look back behind you. What do you see on the shore? A person, a person that's waving, waving at you. They're jumping up and down, trying to get your attention. You look closer, and you see that that person is you. It's not you of right now; it's you of a couple of months ago. The person you were before this perilous journey started. And they're concerned about you. They have a message. You can see them shouting, but you can't quite make it out. You rest back down. You think, "What was it they wanted to tell me? What was it that I needed to hold on to? What is it that I am at risk of forgetting?"
Okay, everyone can open their eyes in real life. I'll see you on Thursday.