“Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion:
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.”
‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, (1834)

Growing up in southeastern Pennsylvania, I remember learning about the so-called ‘age of exploration’, probably an aged moniker today, but hey, this was *gasp* the late-90s. One thing that stuck with me from all those lessons about Christopher Columbus’s supposed ‘discovery’ of the new world, Ferdinand Magellan’s unceremonious demise in Southeast Asia, and Henry Hudson’s ill-fated attempt(s) to uncover a waterway that linked the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and so on, is a rather minor aspect of wind-based sea travel: getting stuck in the doldrums. 

It seems silly now that I still think of that idea first when considering that period of European and North American history, but imagine getting stuck on a relatively small wooden ship, surrounded by a potentially mutinous, and likely vitamin C-deficient crew, in the middle of a vast unknown ocean, hopeful but (without veering too much into the metaphysical) uncertain that the winds would ever pick back up, fill your flagging sails, and push you on to a destination some unknown number of leagues away. I am not particularly afraid of the sea, but that does not sound like a good time. 

This notion came back to me as I recently pondered my experience as a 2L in law school. Fortunately for me and everyone else, I do not think scurvy or an overthrow of law school leadership poses any major threat, but I never let details get in the way of a half-decent metaphor. At times, I felt adrift this semester, lying idle between the frantic, scary, and yet invigorating experience of navigating the thunderous waves and tides of 1L and the beckoning shores of life as a lawyer after taking the bar, putting to the side for a moment that the bar (the sand bar? Too much?) is a major obstacle in and of itself. 

Unlike many of my classmates, I did not change much from first year to second year. I did not sign up for a clinic, no externship for me, and I chose not to apply for a journal position. As someone with a fair amount of work experience coming into law school (again, I went to elementary school in the 90s/early 2000s), I decided to leave the professional ranks to study and learn, not to bolster my resume with other obligations. From that aspect, I have very much enjoyed my 2L year so far, but it has come with a strange feeling of running through a script that now feels very, very familiar, like a sitcom actor who already knows the beats and catch-phrases he has to run through episode after episode. Not in the sense that I know the material, but more the rises and falls of a law school semester: the energy and novelty of the early weeks, the classroom-wide exhaustion that creeps in around October (along with the change of the season, and the rising nervousness as finals season approaches like the Ides of March.

That feeling of predictability, and maybe because of my particular position in life (along with a federal government shutdown, which meant my girlfriend was working without pay), has made it harder to separate my immediate experiences from my desire to find financial security. Moreover, as someone who likely will not practice in Boston and will return to California next summer, I struggled to keep my mind focused on the here and now, and not (ahem) daydreaming about life back in the place that has become my home over the past decade—certainly even more so with all that has happened to that area over the past year. I was sitting still, while thinking only about where I wanted to go.  But in recent weeks, I recalibrated and found new ways to refocus myself on the job at hand and maximize my enjoyment of what will surely be something I look back on with fondness for the rest of my life: attending law school at Boston College. 

A few things have helped me, and I hope that they can help others as well. First, I took some pressure off in my studies. As a 1L, I felt somewhat comfortable in my discomfort in learning the material because I did not know anything about the law coming into school, and—to keep the metaphors of bygone days going—Rome wasn’t built in a day. As a 2L, I thought (hoped?) that things would come to me much more quickly and naturally, and they probably have, but I lost some perspective and became defeated when studies became arduous. 

Recently I have made a conscious effort to return to the mindset of simply doing the best that I can, learning as much as I can from all these gifted minds, and enjoying the pains of the process. I also reformed my habits. I “soft quit” social media; every time I want to open Instagram or Twitter (I won’t call it X and you can’t make me), I force myself to read The New York Times, read a book, or, frankly, just stare out at the trees until I get bored. Third, I refocused on fitness and diet and found new challenges to try in both areas. And lastly, I started re-exploring the arts and film to remind myself of the beauty and quality in the world, outside of achievement in the law or at school.

Law school is a long and complex journey. The irony being that at the end of it, further challenges remain: the bar, the career, family, and so on. It can be easy to become overwhelmed and disillusioned—to believe that wind will never come. But the power remains within us, and it’s the habits you build here that can make the rest of your life in the law an enjoyable and sustainable one.

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Ian Hurley is a second-year student at BC Law. Contact him at hurleyia@bc.edu.