When you’re getting divorced it’s easy to be frazzled-fried by Friday night. How do I know? Because I’ve been a divorce attorney for two decades and I’m often fried on Friday nights.
Having spent all week listening to my client’s divorce related problems, finding solutions, giving them advice, navigating personalities and difficult attorneys, mediators, spouses… I’m beat and you probably will be too.
If your spouse is being ridiculous and saying things like, “You don’t deserve to get anything” or, “I want sole legal and physical custody of our child” or “I own the house – you do not” I’m pretty sure you’re feeling frazzled. You’re married to, and must divorce, an unreasonable person, which can feel like being trapped in a room with some beast blocking your way to freedom. In some respects, you and your life are being held hostage, there are few things you can do about it and most of the options suck (e.g. throwing in the towel, battling it out).
Yes, it can be that bad. And you and I can’t really put our brains on a shelf and walk away for the weekend. Hence, it’s so important to find ways to keep your mind healthy.
How do I do that?
One of the ways I keep a healthy mind is listening to the conversations On Being with Krista Tippett.
What is On Being? On Being “opens up the animating questions at the center of human life: What does it mean to be human, and how do we want to live? These questions are explored in their richness and complexity in 21st-century lives and endeavors. They also pursue wisdom and moral imagination as much as knowledge; esteem nuance and poetry as much as fact.”
On Being is the home of the Civil Conversations Project, an emergent approach to new conversation and relationship across the differences of our age. On Being’s listeners, readers, and online communities cross boundaries that separate them in the culture at large: generational, socioeconomic, political, religious. They report that On Being equips them to relate in fresh, new ways to different others, and emboldens them to engage in new kinds of service.
Who is Krista Tippett? A pretty brilliant gal with a gorgeous voice, which makes listening and learning easy. Officially,
Krista Tippett is a Peabody Award-winning broadcaster and New York Times bestselling author. In 2014, she received the National Humanities Medal at the White House for “thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence…She studied history at Brown University and went to Bonn, West Germany in 1983 on a Fulbright Scholarship to study politics in Cold War Europe. She also is the granddaughter of a Southern Baptist minister and pursued a M.Div. from Yale.
Here are a few of the episodes I’ve listened to recently.
Science of Mindlessness and Mindfulness with social psychologist and Harvard professor Ellen Langer. She discusses mindfulness pragmatically, not spiritually though I don’t think you can separate the two.
Seeing the Underside and Seeing God: Tattoos, Tradition and Grace with Nadia Bolz-Weber who breaks religious molds and actually kind of makes the Lutheran faith sexy – seriously. She’s a pastor or pastrix, founder of the church, House for All Sinners and Saints, and the author of Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint. Even if religion isn’t your thing, Nadia’s interesting.
These are the episodes I’m going to listen to next.
Suicide, and Hope for Our Future Selves by Jennifer Michael Hecht – this one strikes a cord living in the community where Robin Williams took his life. It weighs heavily on my heart whenever I think of it and wish he were here with us today.
The Biology of the Spirit by Sherwin Nuland, who “reflects on the meaning of life by way of scrupulous and elegant detail about human physiology.” Wow. Who doesn’t want to know what it all means and why we’re here? Sherwin Nuland “was a clinical professor of surgery at Yale University, where he also taught bioethics and medical history.” He won the National Book Award for How we Die – and now he knows how we die. He died recently at age 83.
I am truly floored by the brilliant contributors and topics On Being.
The discussions and teachers redirect my attention from business towards understanding what it means to be human and examining how I want to live. They have led me to make big changes in my life so I live it the way I want to, which is a bit unconventional and requires great courage.
Even while writing this post I feel I’ve just glanced out a window onto what matters most.
I highly recommend On Being and throwing in a little music and dancing in between. They’re all good for freeing the mind and feeding the soul.
And if you have a ridiculous spouse whose jamming-up your California divorce process and you want solutions, you’re in luck.
Finding solutions to difficult divorce problems is exactly what I do and may be able to do for you too. With divorce coaching and consulting options I can lend a hand in the heat of the moment and help usher you through the weeks ahead, whichever you need.
