ponder | on finding your 'grounding interest' in studying law

Note: This post contains graphic images of Omran Daqneesh, the injured 'Aleppo Boy' who survived the recent Syrian airstrikes. 

The hardest thing about being a law student, is not in keeping up with the 300+ pages of readings that are assigned each week, or dealing with the competitive classroom environment or demanding professors, it is assignment season. Essentially, those few weeks around the middle of the semester where you have back to back assignment deadlines. "Drowning" is the word that most aptly describes how one feels during this period of the semester.

Having now made it through half of my law degree, I find that it is often during assignment season that I am pulling my hair out in the wee hours of the morning trying to write a paper whilst simultaneously feeling inadequate and slightly dumb (as nothing seems to be making sense by this point of the night). Close friends of mine have also become quite accustomed to receiving late night "freak out" texts where I basically freak out and talk about how maybe I'm just "not cut out for law". 

Generally this feeling subsides once the assignments have been submitted, so I know it is more emotionally driven rather than based on fact. But learning the law can be unpredictable, in that some concepts can be so foreign that just because you have read something twice, does not guarantee that you will understand it. 

This was a big difference I found compared to studying for my first degree in Commerce, where you are guaranteed to more or less understand the concepts as long as you put your time in doing your readings once before the exam. During assignment season, when it feels as though there is never enough time no matter how organised you are, this aspect of learning the law can be incredibly frustrating and can make even the smartest student feel inadequate. 

This semester however, I have decided to try a different approach. Instead of freaking out when I feel as though I'm drowning in the content and the assignment deadlines, I centre my mind by tuning into my "grounding interest" in law. It is something borrowed from yoga, where we begin each practice with an intention that then grounds us throughout the practice. 

The 'grounding interest" could be something like an idea that appeals to you when you first thought about becoming a lawyer, or the impact that you want to make in this world once you begin practising as a lawyer, or perhaps even the kind of person that you are hoping to become, once you make it as a lawyer. In essence, this is the very "thing" that drove you to apply for law school in the first place.

My grounding interest lies in my belief that lawyers have the power to help people navigate obstacles that they otherwise would not have had the skill or expertise to navigate, and because of this power, it should be part of my duties as a lawyer, to dedicate a portion of my time, skill and expertise in helping humanity. It is a grandiose statement, but it is the "grounding interest" that keeps motivating me to power through from one semester to the next. So far, it seems to have helped in curbing those late night freak outs as well as maintaining motivation.  

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I wanted to end this post today by sharing something that struck my heart this week, and reminded me of the shred of impact that I hope to make one day as a pro-bono human rights lawyer in assisting people fleeing from war torn countries. 

As you may have already seen this week, a heartbreaking image of a little boy in Aleppo who had survived the Syrian airstrikes, became one of trending topics on social media. The image reminded us of the atrocities of war on innocent lives and in particular, on innocent children, some of whom have only ever lived in a war torn environment. The video below not only shows a CNN newsreader brought to tears on air by this image, but it also shows a segment of video footage, depicting the moment when the little boy was rescued.