Had I Known: On the Value of Unavoidable Ignorance
February 17, 2020

     So, for some things, ignorance really is bliss, or can help you get there at least.  Since you can't know everything about what's in front of you anyway, and since, if you did, you probably wouldn't take some of your most important leaps, it is a mercy, in some sense, that our knowledge of the future is limited.
   
     Had I known how much sleep I would lose, and just how much chaos I would have to learn to tolerate, in becoming a mother of three, I might have thought twice about jumping into parenthood.  That's ridiculous, of course, because the love that I share with my kids, and the joy they bring to my life, is totally worth all the lost sleep and all the chaos and more.  Also, I am a much better person because of my kids – more generous, less stressed, more hopeful, more determined.  But I only understand the trade-off because I've inhabited it from the inside.  I had to live it to get it.  

     Had I known how much time it would take to carry out the duties of president of the local school foundation (a charitable endowment for our local public school district), I might have declined the opportunity.  In fact, there are other, similar opportunities in my community that I have declined, and will decline, out of sheer self-preservation – or financial survival, since an attorney's time is their money.  But this particular service opportunity has allowed me to put my money where my mouth is, by helping this organization make some critical forward leaps of its own – and thereby fulfilling a promise I made years ago when I left teaching for law school, a promise at the heart of my law school application essay:  to use my advocacy skills as an attorney to promote public education.  I had no idea at the time I wrote that essay that I would get the opportunity to live up to that promise back home, in support of the very school district that I was leaving.  But that same school district had shepherded my own public education, and it is now the one shepherding my children's education.  So it is right and fitting that I fulfill my promise through this service.  It's just a good thing I didn't know in advance how much it would cost me, in time and thus in treasure.

    Had I known what a long, hard slog it would be to get through some of the probates that local judges have asked me to assist with, I might very well have turned down those opportunities as well.  A probate is the set of legal proceedings to determine how a person's property should be distributed after they die, and probate practice is central to my law practice now.  Most of the time, probates are merely paper-pushing exercises, intended to ensure that any creditors are paid, a clean chain of title to real estate is preserved, and all other property is distributed to heirs in an orderly fashion.  But sometimes probates take a turn for the thornier side, and I am now on my fifth or sixth of this kind, most of which have come to me by way of a phone call from a judge, asking me to step in as the official, court-appointed Personal Representative for the estate.  It is an honor to be asked by a judge to take on such a responsibility – and one that an attorney, particularly a relatively young attorney, cannot lightly decline.  But judges only make these calls when a case has already proven itself especially challenging, marked by things like:  seemingly intractable family fighting, difficulties with identification or location of assets, or potential embezzlement of estate funds by a family friend.  So if I had had more experience under my belt when I received these judicial calls, I might have been more . . . well, judicious about saying yes to such appointments.

  

    But then again, I wouldn't be getting so much experience under my belt.  As I said, probate is the core of my practice now, along with its corresponding practice for the living: estate planning.  And I find that I have a strange affinity and aptitude for these areas of legal practice.  They suit me in a way I could have never anticipated.  But I wouldn't be learning their ins-and-outs, their traps and pitfalls, their tricks and shortcuts, nearly so readily if I weren't taking on these hard cases.  It's oh-so-true that you learn the rule by the exceptions, and the exceptional cases are the best ones by which you learn the rules and how to use them advantageously.  So it's probably a good thing, in the long run, that I didn't know going in just how hard these probates would be – and how financially risky in some instances.  I might not have stuck my neck out quite so far.  And I wouldn't be learning nearly as much.