There was a period in my life when I equated small talk with tedium. I don’t think I had a problem with it prior to that or found it so distasteful that I took active measures to avoid it. The feeling stole upon me unawares. During that time, I found the pleasantries and customs of introductory and preliminary conversation at social, formal and family engagements, particularly onerous and boring. There is only so far we …
My father once recited Rudyard Kipling’s If to me. I loved it and resonated with every line in that poem. But some of those lines I hold fast to. One of them is: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, And treat those two impostors just the same:” Because of that line, whether it is a personal win, a loss, a success, a failure, an achievement, something to be proud of, or something to …
it is usually a sign that I have not got enough sleep or lost my sense of gratitude, often both. The former often leads to the latter. It happens when I forget to take meaningful breaks, stay up very late often and am prevented from expressing my agency and autonomy. If it is caused by these, then the remedy is simple: sleep earlier, get a full night’s rest, take my time with work and people …
I see a lot of this on social media these days. Daily, we are treated to a surfeit of self-generated pictures, Tik-Tok Videos, Facebook Posts, Twitter Tweets, Instagram LinkedIn Posts and whatever else by lawyers bragging up or lyrically wa-waxing about a lawyer’s exciting or dramatic working life, a lawyer’s hardship, a lawyer’s work life and all that go with it. Much of these are the efforts of young lawyers in an attempt to gain …
As a practitioner of family law who oversees, manages and bears witness to the breakdown and failure of spousal and family relationships, as someone who has been through a divorce and remarried, and as someone who reflects and reads about those issues, I’d like to think I have some insight into the genesis, longevity and breakdown of spousal relationships. Starting a relationship is easy. Getting into a new relationship is an exciting, thrilling and delightful …