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I took a part-job last July. I’d completed a big chunk of a book project and needed to shake up my life. So I reached out to the few people I know locally and one responded. Days later, I had a paralegal job even though I haven’t done such work in, oh my, 40 years. But the universe always provides what I need, even if I don’t see that need at the time. This time, it was my own estate documents. (My boss is an estate and probate attorney.) I am putting them in place, thanks to my boss’ urgings. In turn, I’m providing not only paralegal help, but also emotional support as he deals with some major life changes. I am not a professional paralegal nor do I aspire to be one. But through this job, I am learning something I didn’t expect, and it has nothing to do with how to draft a legal document and everything to do with the larger social game. Every game has rules. The legal system in this country is ours. And I am seeing those rules up close and personal, hidden in legal jargon and nuance. When I go in my boss’ office to be a witness to a will, or notarize an estate document, I often see my own bewilderment with this “foreign language” reflected in his clients’ faces. They are following his lead, and trusting him to translate their wishes into the legal documents they are signing. Lucky for them, he is an honest man. In The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America, professor and banking authority Mehrsa Baradaran articulated what I was seeing first-hand. Yes, the legal system in our country lays out the rules of the game we live by, but it is “perforated with legal loopholes, opaque procedures and legal complexity,” notes Baradaran. Over time, it has become a “big dumb self-cannibalizing machine” that we obey without thinking. My boss does it. His clients comply. Even I do as I draft my own estate documents for his review. Each of us is, in fact, complicit in the game; we keep it going. The solution, notes Baradaran, is not more laws but to recalibrate the scale itself. “The upside of nothing working is that anything is possible…,” she writes. It is, in fact, what business gurus call “creative destruction.” A market is destroyed and then remade through innovation and the result is better living standards for all. (Think the industrial revolution or the emergence of the computer.) Creative destruction is occurring not only socially, but also personally today. By choice or circumstance, people are having to recalibrate their own lives, invariably through loss. I am. So are others I know. But creative destruction has shown repeatedly that such losses are the precursor to a better next chapter and often, at least for me, a deeper, richer and more meaningful one. My role in this evolving story is simply to be present, bear witness, and hold a circle of compassion around myself and others as, individually and collectively, we create the next chapter. Carolyn
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