Prey Everyday

After a mere 9.6 hours of sleep last night, I made my way to the shower and got myself out the door in record time. I was on the train absorbed in the New York Times Magazine (it takes me a good 6 days to make my way through the Sunday NYT) and suddenly I was at my stop. I still wasn't fully awake, but I realized that I had forgotten to spend my entire train ride perseverating about the work day ahead. I usually concentrate on my fear and really stoke it up during my commute when I am busy at work. I have suddenly found myself busy in the most agonizing way. I will have the humbling experience of facing a blank page over the next few days, the same blank page that needs to be filled with adriot legal arguments and convincing prose about why my client deserves a little thing we like to call his Constitutional rights. No pressure, just several hundred years of inalienable rights, self-evident truths, and the ghosts of our forefathers hanging over my head.

I filed off the train with all the other shuffling commuters and suprised myself by saying what I think was a prayer:

God, please bless my efforts today.

Hm? What? I didn't know I was going to say or pray that and my first reaction was, "wow, that's a pretty holy way to start the day. I must be a good person if I am asking God to bless my efforts."

But, then I went down a whole other road.

My next thought was, wait, I can't just ask God to bless my efforts. What if I was on the way to my office to plan a murder or to embezzle funds or steal from my assistant's 401K plan? I was thinking maybe it's not right to ask God to just sign off on whatever it is I do today. What if I go to my office, become incapacitated with fear about the blank page waiting patiently for me -- stalking me-- and spend the whole day ordering unnecessary courdoroy clothing from on-line retailers? Would God bless that? Do I want God to bless that? Would that be an effort? Actually, it would be an effort because it can be challenging to find good courdoroy that is not too heavy, or grainy, but also not too light. I mean this is Chicago, so it has to be thick, but not so thick you end up staring at your thighs in your new courdoroy pants and thinking they are twice as big because the material is so damn thick. You also don't want those ridges in the material to be too thick because when you take your pants off your butt will look like a griddle, especially if you favor thong underwear.

So, then I thought, well, even if I was coming to my office to plan illegal and nefarious deeds -- which I am not, by the way-- then inviting God to bless those deeds may mean that God can intercede and change the course of the day. That sounds like a good idea if I was confused enough to be planning my daily felonies and also praying for a blessing.

But then again, I think maybe you are supposed to pray for God's will to be done, whatever that is, and just hope you can face it without hurting yourself or others. I wasn't praying for any old thing to happen, though. Implicit in my prayer was that I was going to go to my office, put forth my best legal efforts, and I wanted the Big Boss of the Universe to sign my slip saying I had done a good day's work.

Then, I started thinking, maybe God doesn't want me to look at my life as an effort-- even my job, which is also known as W-O-R-K and traditionally is associated with effort. Lots and lots of effort. What do I know? Maybe God wants me to relax, show up and let Him or Her handle the effort. Maybe the notion that I use my will and my efforts to change a world that belongs to God is grandoise and a mark of my most fatal flaw: hubris. But that's the most confusing part because I am pretty sure it was my efforts that got me through law school and I was surely the one who showed up for those infernal tests.

This whole thought process took about 3 minutes and I wasn't even out of the train station yet. It wasn't even 8:15 a.m. That's what I get for reading an article on philosphy and paying attention to my thoughts.

I think it's going to be a very long day.