Yeah, I said it — it’s a blip. It’s just a moment in a very big picture.
Much as you think you wanted a certain outcome no matter what, you do not want to pass on the margin, I assure you.
New lawyering relies very little on your legal education or your bar exam preparation. Instead, it requires drawing on the vault of life experiences you have earned, your abilities as a competent person, and the “idea” that someone gave you a license. You will be making judgment calls, based on very little professional authority.
As a new lawyer, I remember the gravity of my first weeks as an in-house lawyer. The entity I served required daily “on-my-feet” legal advice, some version of “I just did X, is it legal?” or “Can I do X, is it legal?”
In the first year, I used to remember thinking, “I don’t know…” Of course, that is not ever the answer. You must know something, even if you are literally just making it up. I don’t mean giving answers without consulting the law, but much legal advice is really just sound personal input about best outcomes.
In the immediacy of my new role, I found myself also thinking, “Well, why not me? I am not less qualified than someone else.”
At the back of that thought was always the license: “THEY GAVE ME A LICENSE.” I rode the fumes of that until I actually did have the legal authority to offer sound counsel. But I want to tell you, there is a gap between your first days and that real legal knowledge, one that fully relies on your own self-belief. Passing the bar is not the end of the pursuit; it’s the beginning, and it should be sound since you will not be solid.
So, ok, getting the license is a serious beginning to creating a lawyer’s internal reference point. But there is a more spiritual reason to see this “setback” as a momentary blip.
That thing that people say about “everything happening for a reason,” it’s really something much deeper than that. Wisdom prevails in the order of things but it requires faith to hold out for it. You have to suspend your immediate desire for the greater knowing —we don’t hope here — the knowing — that the thing is already accomplished in the ether.
It simply awaits all the right lining up of forces for your good before it comes into being. A student once hired me after failing the bar as they often do. He was devastated that a job he was offered in Japan would now elude him because he failed the bar. It was apparently the job of his dreams; on paper. It had all the qualities of what he expected success would look like for him when he imagined his future. But after passing the bar and landing at a New York law firm, he realized that the original job would have altered the course of his life away from where he now knew he belonged.
There is indeed providence in the delay. That has never failed to be true for anyone I know encountering what looks in the moment like a loss or disappointment.
For myself, 59 years into this life, I can say confidently that I never lost anything where something better did not follow, and I have lost some really hard things. This truth is not a majority proposition; it is without fail. What other things in life can you say have been promised in life without fail?
I admit though sometimes a thing had to be wrested from me before I could relent my idea of what should be, and painfully, in retrospect, that resistance to change and disappointment always took away energy and joy at the moment and delayed my progress. I have not reached the place of total enlightenment, where I can simply ride the waves of life without fear and worry entirely. But I do have the wisdom of knowing it will be, enough to walk myself away from the smallness of my immediate disappointments.
Something better is always lining up for me. Something better is always lining up for you. Sometimes you need to be pulled off of your path to find it — or better stated, to receive it. You don’t really need to find it. It will find you. The screaming “I passed!!!!” calls come, every time. And I get to say, “Of course you did, you always had this in you.”
So take a deep breath. Allow yourself to be altogether swallowed up by the pain of this moment— that is also part of the experience. Avoiding the pain probably assures repeating it and it also consumes the energy you will need in the next endeavor to be fully present and serious. And if you do it right, that next effort will be largely an entirely new moment, but also a blip in your big picture.
Deborah Sanders is the owner of Bar-None Prep and has taught the bar prep method she created for her own bar exam for over twenty years. She is based in New Jersey. In addition to a regular column on NationalJurist.com, she is writing a book on “The Spiritual Path to Passing the Bar.” You can contact her at passthebar@barnoneprep.com.
