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Eight Simple Words

During my junior year in high school, I sat in the back of our auditorium listening to our drama teacher, Ruth Bair, attempt to persuade a large group of students to try out for the school play.  With me, at least, she was successful.  I auditioned for a part in Archibald MacLeish's "JB," a modern day drama based on the Book of Job.  All I garnered that time was a walk-on part; better roles awaited me my senior year.  But Mrs. Bair's little speech was enough to get me in the game.  And the experience of  performing in the school plays was the highlight of my high school years.

What she said that I remember is this:  "If you don't extend yourself, you haven't lived."  Some memory of biology class made me think that this was both literally and figuratively true, though I'm not sure about the literal part, and it's only the figurative that matters to me.  But through the years and decades that followed, whenever I was unsure about participating in a new adventure, it was Ruth Bair's voice that egged me on.  I can't begin to measure the difference those eight simple words have made in my life.  I have repeated her advice to my children, and to captive audiences of new lawyers at their swearing-in ceremonies.

We hear other voices all the time, voices that make us question whether extending ourselves is such a good idea.  Seth Godin, in his book "Linchpin," talks about the lizard brain within us, aka "the resistance."  It is the instinctive voice of self-preservation that warns us not to venture out, but rather to stay still and quiet in the safety of our dens, with our heads down.  Godin's message:  quiet the lizard brain and become a leader.  In other words:  extend ourselves.

By not extending ourselves, we deprive ourselves of new experiences, and narrow our perspectives.  The other night, I listened to an "On Point" broadcast in which host Tom Ashbrook interviewed physicist Leonard Mlodinow, the co-author of Steven Hawking's new book, "The Grand Design."  As much as Ashbrook and Mlodinow tried to dumb the interview down for us non-scientists in the audience, it remained barely comprehensible, requiring some prior knowledge of quantum physics and string theory, for example.  Mlodinow talked about the number of additional dimensions that physicists and mathematicians believe exist beyond the three that we know.  He also asked the audience to imagine a two-dimensional universe, and the perspective of a bacterium crawling along it.  The bacterium, presumably also of two dimensions, would not know anything beyond that limited universe, and could not imagine a third dimension in the universe that we know.

And so it is in life.  If we do not extend ourselves, we limit our ability to perceive and understand the world outside our narrow vision.  When I let Ruth Bair's words encourage me to try scuba diving during the Caribbean vacations my wife and I took before we had children, I was opened to an undersea world that was more beautiful and diverse than anything I had previously imagined.  When I allowed the mantra to push me to become active in the Boston Bar Association early in my career, I was opened to a legal profession that was much broader and more diverse than anything I had known stuck within the confines of my law firm.  When I extended my activities to service on non-profit boards outside of my profession, I made connections with new friends and role models who help to shape who I am and with whom I try to give back to the world in whatever modest ways I can.  Maybe, out of ignorance, I would not have regretted spending these years keeping my head down, doing my work, and avoiding the time commitments that come from new endeavors and volunteer opportunities.  But now, with the knowledge of what I would have been missing, I remain grateful to Ruth Bair, and continue the effort to quiet the lizard brain within.




 

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