Partner? (Part II)

Okay, okay. I take it allllllll back. My last post, that is. Or, rather, the purported “ill feelings” that managed to seep into my bellyaching. So allow me to set the record straight. I am NOT unhappy. Not in the way my last post seemed to have suggested anyway (Thank you, friend, for pointing out my inadvertent folly). And again for the record, I love my job. And what I do.

Where else in Manila can a lawyer genuinely, hand-on-heart, claim a daily learning? That daily test of meeting a legal challenge posed by non-legal minds, and finding for them, and for oneself, the proverbial loophole, the “out” that allows the business visionary to fly with his brilliant idea, unencumbered by “what the law says”. And then there’s the pounding in the chest (and the gagging … the gagging!) that one invariably gets in the hours before a management presentation, asking yourself if you’ve covered all the bases – what possible flaws in the overall strategy could they possibly find, you ask, after you’ve toiled and spent countless sleepless nights polishing the solution, convinced at each step that there can be no intelligent opposition to the plan? What could possibly go wrong? But then, the inevitable discovery, in the heat of the discussion, or debate, with the BBs, that, yes, you were quite right to be stressed, you have missed something … again. You console yourself in the end that because of your inexperience and sad lack of “business sense” (You are just a lawyer, after all) you couldn’t possibly have thought of that. Next time, you say, I’ll do better, because now I know better. But you never do.

And that is what makes what I do absolutely wonderful.

The questions that beg to be asked in re my last post are: Could I be happier if I had stayed on in the firm and become partner?; Would I have become a better lawyer? I am convinced that the answer to both questions is no. And that, my friend, is the reason I will not ask for a salary increase or a promotion when I go up for appraisal this year. Everything apart from the intellectual rewards of the job just seems so … trivial.

Sadly, however, and I agree with you, there is a practical reality. We do have responsibilities. There’s a household to run. Bills to pay. A child to send off to school in June. And then there’s the dream of my own home. And of a title that says, "I am important, eat my bullshit."

But it comes back to me each time … What I do is wonderful. How then do I will myself to want another job, even if that job promises to pay all the bills; even if that job could come with a title that declares that I am one to be reckoned with?