OPINION
Monday, December 1, 2014 5
A Christmas Carol for My Fellow Students
Replacing darkness and despair with hopes of goodwill
and renewed optimism
heather pringle › layout editor
A
s the holiday season quickly approaches,
and another year slowly comes to an end, it
seems only fitting to pause and reflect upon
the moments that have passed us by, those
we currently live in, and those yet to come. It is far
too easy for us law students to narrow the perspective
on our lives during this time of the year to little more
than eating, studying, and sleeping. And at times,
two of those three seem merely optional. To persist
down this path may bring the immediate rewards of
academic glory and the justification needed for a seventh eggnog latte in one day, but it also detracts our
attention away from the bigger picture we are part
of, the reasons why we have chosen to walk this path
in the first place. So in true Dickensian fashion, this
salty, old Scrooge would like to explore the depths of
her own soul in hopes of arriving at the traditional
epiphany often espoused as the end of another year
goes by. After all, what kind of a paper would this
be without the pontifications of its staff? No, don’t
answer that.
The Ghost of Christmas Past
I think it’s safe to say that each and every one of us
has found ourselves in our present predicament – it
is, after all, both a blessing and a curse – as a result
of circumstances that bear a great significance in our
life. So while it’s easy to dismiss the cliché question
‘Why did you apply to law school?’ in jest, the likely
reality is that the answer is the motivation influencing how our journeys take shape during these next
years. To that end, it seems somewhat appropriate to
reflect on where we started, regardless of where we
currently stand, to gain a full appreciation of just how
far we’ve already come since then. It might seem trite
to point out, but the value isn’t in revealing the process per se, but rather the substantive insight that it
can provide.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I’m
probably one of the black sheep as far as one’s expectations of a law student is concerned. Or at the very
least, I’m a dark shade of grey. I didn’t arrive at law
school through the front doors like most. Instead, I
slipped in through the delivery doors after spending
a good ten years traipsing about the yard looking at
cloud bunnies in the sky and occasionally pondering
whether it’s possible to build an elevator to space. I
was an art student. My Ghost of Christmas Past brings
memories of a career that indulged in radicalism and
scoffed at the notion of doing anything conventional.
It was a time where I was free-spirited in thought
and not yet tempered by the pragmatic realities that
quickly become evident after a single semester of law
school. I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, but I
was fortunate to have the opportunity to find myself
in a field that fosters innovation without placing barriers that preven [