Surprise!  The Life You Never Imagined is Calling
February 12, 2020

     So twist a bit, take a few wacky turns, do something even you didn't expect.  Surprise yourself.  The only thing you have to lose is the chance to learn something – about yourself, about the world, about what you're capable of doing in the world, about the gifts you can bring into the world.  And you'll only lose that chance if you don't take it.  So take it.  Take several.  Take a whole decade's worth.  See what happens.

     * * *

     This September, I'll mark ten years since I was sworn in by the Justices of the Supreme Court of Oklahoma to practice law in this state.  But practicing law was something I never saw coming ten years before that. It was nowhere on my radar as a younger person.  In high school, I was on the Speech & Debate team, but I stayed safely over on the Speech-y side of things.  I avoided anything that involved even a whiff of confrontation – even the canned confrontation of formal debate competition.  And in college, my closest friends knew that the only thing that rivaled my penchant for conflict avoidance was my commitment to my sleep.  "Where's Georgeann?"  "Oh, she's either sleeping or avoiding the tension in the room."  I actually told people in those years that my personal mascot should be an ostrich.  I'm not kidding.

     So it was not until well into my fifth or sixth year of teaching high school that the idea of going to law school even occurred to me.  I didn't really know any attorneys well.  There were none in my family, and I while I knew of several attorneys in town, I didn't have any sense of what they actually did from day to day – aside from what one sees in courtroom dramas in movies and on TV.  And those didn't interest me in the slightest.  (Also, courtroom dramas do not depict what the vast majority of attorneys do day to day.  But I did not realize that at the time.)  What I did know was that among my college classmates, law school was sort of a fall-back option.  If you weren't headed to medical school or into investment banking or consulting (common precursors to business school), then law school was the next logical choice for professional training.  And many of those people didn't have a burning desire to participate in courtroom drama, so maybe they knew something I didn't.  Also, I had a close friend tell me I'd make a good judge someday, and that intrigued me – although I knew precisely nothing about what judges do either.  

   This is how law school won out for me over graduate programs in psychology or school administration, despite the fact that, by the time I actually started studying for the LSAT, I had grown accustomed to seeing myself as more of the high school counselor or high school principal type.  There were no flashing lights, no singing angels, no profound sense of calling or vocation.  Just, "Hmmm.  Law school.  That's interesting.  I think I'll try it."  I pushed pause on my inner artist, at whose insistence I had also briefly toyed with the idea of trying to get into one of those fancy MFA writing programs – what with the romance of the writer's life still glowing in me from my teens.  (I had even visited the University of Iowa on the way back from a fishing trip to Minnesota one summer, to see if lightning might strike in the form of an Iowa Writer's Workshop residency.  But I ultimately concluded I didn't have the chops for that.)  And while I had also long fantisized about returning to the womb of academia and staying there as a professor of one sort or another, I realized I had basically missed the train on that one.  But I wasn't too terribly disappointed about it.  Landing a tenure-track professorship somewhere, I reasoned, would probably involve a good deal of moving around, and  by this time, I was ready to commit to a place.  I was married by now, and I wasn't particularly enamored with the idea of dragging my husband all over creation.  And besides, I had already had my fling with the outside world in college.  And I had come back to make Oklahoma my home.  

     So law school it was, specifically at the University of Oklahoma.

 * * *

     And law practice it is today, specifically in the small town where I grew up in the far northeast corner of Oklahoma.  

     Turns out, it was a good move.  Ten years into this gig, and it's just starting to get that favorite-pair-of-jeans feel to it.  Oh, and chicken shit.  Literally.  I'm liable to have a little chicken shit on my pants at any given time these days – what with the micro-farm gig brewing on the side.  Such is the life of a gentlewoman farmer.   

     I didn't see that coming.  Life is full of surprises.