All items from Spiritually Bankrupt

Resolution, Part 2: Integration

So after all that, what was my (now 3 months ago) new year’s resolution?  One word: Integration.
n. The making up or composition of a whole by adding together or combining the separate parts or elements; combination into an integral whole: a making whole or entire.
(courtesy of the Oxford English Dictionary)
There are four big buckets of stuff in my life (in order of the amount of time they take): family, work, me (social life, reading, writing), and yoga.  As you might guess, these realms frequently come into conflict.  The most obvious example is that work can keep me from spending time with my family or practicing yoga.
But it was my desire to write and the conflicts that produced that really got me thinking.  A couple of years ago, I decided I needed to take my shot at writing fiction, that if I didn’t become a regular fiction writer, I would die unfulfilled.  I spent a lot of time at it and stressed about it even more.  I struggled to set aside time to write and was fiercely possessive of that time.  Meanwhile, I had two young children, a brand new law firm, and had just become a trustee.  Not surprisingly, the fact that I suddenly wanted a bunch of time to myself led to a lot of conflict at home and at work as well as within myself.



From Spiritually Bankrupt
Posted 2 weeks 5 days ago

Every Monday is a tremendous opportunity!

courtesy of yogayoga, Austincourtesy of yogayoga, Austin
 



From Spiritually Bankrupt
Posted 7 weeks 19 hours ago

Resolution, Part 1

fireworks-16
I don’t make New Year’s resolutions.  I’m usually too busy around the holidays, between the kids being off from school, end-of-year accounting for my firm, and dealing with January 1st foreclosures.  I’m more reflective right after the holidays as I am gearing up to make something happen in the new year.  I did make a resolution this year (albeit one I formulated back in the summer), but that will be the subject of my next post, “Resolution, Part 2.”
Despite not having the habit of resolving out loud on January 1, I have changed tremendously and accomplished a great deal over the last several years.  I have become a better lawyer, a better colleague, a better dad, a better yogi.  I have lost 50 lbs.  I have learned the ins and outs of my new position as a bankruptcy trustee.  I have built a new law firm.  People have congratulated me for these successes over the years, but I am just at a point now of being able to take a deep breath and acknowledge the changes and reflect.  The two things I can say with certainty are that: 1) I changed in ways I did not anticipate much less intend, and 2) the changes were accompanied by a lot of suffering.



From Spiritually Bankrupt
Posted 12 weeks 21 hours ago

Smile!


People from back home ask me all the time if I think of myself as a Texan.  I moved to Austin from New York 18 years ago to attend UT Law, and except for two years from 1999 to 2001 I’ve lived here ever since.  Despite my prolonged residency in the state, for years and years I answered that I definitely was NOT a Texan.  I stubbornly read the New Yorker and the New York Times, rooted for New York sports teams, ate all the lox I could get my hands on, and so on.
Despite my resistance, Texas has been great to me.  Austin is a bit different from the rest of Texas but shares at least one trait with the rest of the state: the people are very friendly.  So friendly, in fact, that Texans often do something that doesn’t happen much in New York: they smile and greet others on the street.  For many years, I resisted this absurd habit and, like a good New Yorker, I kept my eyes steadily fixed forward.



From Spiritually Bankrupt
Posted 25 weeks 6 days ago

The Big Picture

As a bankruptcy lawyer and trustee, I am caught up in the day to day minutiae of my work: advising clients, conducting creditors’ meetings, filing Motions to Sell, serving my firm, mentoring my colleagues, and on and on. These things consume me every day as though they were fire. I counsel my clients every day not to become too caught up in their financial difficulties, to take a deep breath, to embrace the promise of a fresh start, and to remember that life goes on after you suffer a financial reversal. But who is there to remind me to have some perspective? It is up to me to take a deep breath and remind myself as often as I can that I am a dad and husband and brother, as well as an individual, a citizen, a human, a creature, an Earthling, a child of the universe, a little piece of creation. Two items have really brought home to me the big picture in the last few weeks. One of them is the discovery of the Higgs-Boson, an elementary particle that confers mass on all the other particles in the universe, including us. News of the discovery (and it takes something for me to read the news any more – more on that later) reminded me that according to the scientific discoveries of the last century, we are ultimately made of energy (that’s what E=MC2 means), which reminded me in turn that this truth is represented artistically at CERN (the laboratory where they made the discovery).



From Spiritually Bankrupt
Posted 42 weeks 5 hours ago