This is not so much a survival guide as a suggestion to balance the responsibilities of law school with general enjoyment: to make time for, or at the least make note of, our daily external pleasures and internal joys (and 1Ls, this is your unauthorized permission to peacefully miss a class or two). I want to be clear that I do not support the individualized wellness discourse that many of us know very well. It is necessary to revel in joy and pleasure in order to know what a better future might look like and sustain the energy to work for it. As the hardship that comes from time constraints within professional degrees is exacerbated by our shared national experience of a cost-of-living crisis and global humanitarian crises, our ability to have energizing moments should be considered political tools.
The mind-body connection
When we think about our chosen education as requiring survival, it creates a heavy perception that our lives during law school are tiresome. Sisyphean. It feeds the idea that we are unique in our struggle. This might draw us away from giving sufficient attention to the important matters of pleasure and joy: the achievement of which releases the pressures of duty and, thereby, generates more room for other fulfillments, such as curiosity. (If we take a Rumi-esque conception of Donoghue v Stevenson, think of how relieved the bottle of ginger beer would have felt when the botulism caused by the snail was released from captivity upon opening – how it would have been freed of its internal pressures). Our minds and bodies are connected, so when the mind ascribes a certain set of facts to a set of external conditions, the body accordingly reacts to how the brain has categorized those conditions. By reframing our perspective, our bodies can release the boulder and the internal pressures, which leaves space for pleasure, comfort, and self-forgiveness.
By reframing our perspective, our bodies can release the boulder and the internal pressures, which leaves space for pleasure, comfort, and self-forgiveness.
Collective pursuit of pleasure
Pursuing pleasure is not a hedonistic pastime! In her book Pleasure Activism, activist and educator Adrienne Maree Brown tells us that “pleasure is a measure of freedom.” Brown states that understanding what brings us pleasure, acting on it, and aligning it with our values can help shape a better future. They believe that pieces of this better future are shaped by transitioning the individual experiences of pleasure into a collective pursuit that attempts to preserve happiness or increase its accessibility. For example, having a nice home is pleasurable because we find comfort in safe environments that we feel agency over – and that pleasure contributes to joy.
Therefore, mobilizing collectively to advocate for affordability is the hopeful progression of individuals making time for pleasure and joy because they accept that everyone should be able to find joy in their environment. When we attribute our legal education to survival, our minds associate that labour with hardship. This mindset leaves less emotional space to participate in other necessary spaces of engagement. Diminishing our need for pleasure and engaging in a false rhetoric of survival also risks forming a belief that subsistence is an acceptable measurement of human life. This contributes to conditions for exploitation at the needless detriment of the communal joy that we deserve.
The real key to surviving law school
As the individual is a reflection of a society’s political and cultural values, in lieu of mobilizing a socially-alienating grind-set, we must choose instead to mobilize slow Sundays and messy group-dinners where you look around the full table thinking, “I want to preserve the future with these people; I want every living-room in the world to be free enough for this degree of pleasure.”
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