Do I really want to be a lawyer?!?

Next Tuesday I sit for (hopefully) my final exam and so this is probably not the time to question the point of the last four years…yet, now that I’m almost at the end, I do question it. I wanted to read and write, write and read all my life, yet law was tempting and when it knocked, I gave in and bid it welcome. And now that I have to decide on a career path and find a job, I really do wonder at it. At the choice I made. And more at the choice I might have let slip past.

There’s a path before you, a path that ends at a cliff, a path you have not walked before. Once you start walking it, you know there can be no returning, not to what you leave behind. So you make a decision to walk, you find someone who makes the sunshine a little bit brighter around you and put one foot in front of the other.

You take their hand and walk, the sweet scent of the world wafting around you. Little stones prick the soft soles, boulders lie across the path, flowers bloom prettily while thorns run down their green stalks. You choose to walk around the boulders, furtively wipe the blood off your fingers and ignore the pricks of pain for if you did not, that path would be walked alone. Alone, in the dark of night when pain is unseen, in the monsoons when tears invisible.

At the end of the path lies the cliff, with the ocean below, yet out of sight. And you don’t know if the waves roll in softly or thunder against the rock. You don’t know if the water is warm and light-dappled or icy and deep. Without the safety of knowing, you need to jump. For you said you would. You took a foot off that cliff, that promising hand in your clammy one, and know now it’s too late to refuse. Too late to run to the footsteps you now suddenly hear behind you. The foot prints you had not stopped to examine before. But it’s too late to run back now for you have committed yourself too much.

If a drowning man clutches at straws, a falling man grabs at anything that floats past. And when you take that jump, what else do you hang on to but optimism? But optimism can be reality’s worst nightmare for it creates hope. It’s the softly fading rainbow of the man losing sight. It makes you search the vacant air for a stray parachute. It keeps the water warm, the sand soft below. And hope never dies. Not till the icy water numbs the pain and you lie on the rocks below, your head splintered, unseeing eyes staring at the empty blue of the sky arching above. Only then, only then, will hope die its silently shattered death.

But who’s to say the parachute will not come?

Now back to the studying...ack!