True Confessions: Personal and Professional Reflections on Turning Fifty (2/10)
By Michael Saint-Onge
I recently celebrated my fiftieth birthday, and no, it wasn’t traumatic — no midlife crisis, no expensive little sportscar purchased to compensate for my waning youth (actually, at fifty, I think it is now fully waned…). But there is something about reaching a milestone that makes one sit up and notice. Life is good, thankfully, but I think it’s a perfect opportunity to “take stock” and figure out where I’ve been and where I am going, both personally and professionally.
It is obvious that there have been some profound changes in our profession during my lifetime. Can you imagine what a law librarian from 1959 would think of a modern law firm library? I think her first question would be “What happened to all the books?” but she couldn’t possibly have anticipated how much information we now have at our fingertips. And we don’t even have to go fifty years back to marvel at these changes. Just in the twenty-three years I’ve been a law librarian, we’ve seen incredible advances. (Have you ever noticed that when a bunch of librarians of a certain age get together, we start to sound like those two old men in the balcony on The Muppets? “In my day, we didn’t have the World Wide Web. We had to FTP files.” “Yeah? In my day the only computer we had was that huge Lexis® terminal in the corner of the library with the rolled paper we had to cut down to size so the attorneys could read it.” It’s the librarian’s equivalent of bragging about having to walk to school in the snow, barefoot.)
No one back then could possibly have predicted how radically technology would alter law librarianship — or the practice of law in general. As hard as it might be for the “kids of today” to believe, the telephone was the technological “weapon of choice” when I first started in the profession. As a reference librarian for the D.C. office of a national law firm, I was frequently asked to obtain obscure federal legislation or regulations from the maze of government offices. Making “friends” with the right contact made the difference between getting what you needed and missing a deadline, and those days we didn’t even have voicemail with which to leave a message. You’d have to pray that whoever took the message on the little pink “While You Were Out” slip took down your information correctly. Now so much more information is on the Internet and is accessible around the clock. But technology has certainly brought its own challenges, hasn’t it? I think it is both easier and harder to get the right information now. Sources keep changing, and it’s a challenge just to keep up. (Some things never change though: a good reference librarian is still worth his or her weight in gold!)
Recognizing that times have changed—and will continue to do so, I’ve had to step back and examine my own professional life to see if I’ve “kept up.” I honestly believe that one of the biggest challenges for librarians as we get older is to keep engaged—to fight against growing cynical or jaded or comfortable with the status quo. It’s hard for everyone as they get older — we begin to feel as though we’ve “seen it all” and “been there, done that.” It’s so much easier to just keep things the way they have always been. But the reality is that we’re living in different times: the legal marketplace has morphed so much, the way we deliver information has changed, and the economy undoubtedly will continue to radically alter the law firm environment. The trick is to move with the times, to actively embrace these changes. But it’s hard for a number of reasons. Inertia sets in, and it seems a heck of a lot easier than the alternative. As one librarian colleague admitted to me recently, “Hey, unless my firm specifically asks me about a product or a service, I’m not going to call their attention to it. If I tell them about a new way to do something, they’ll just ask me to implement it! More work for me!” While I understand the feeling—I mean, who wants more work?—I cringed when I heard this. How cool it would be to implement a new way of delivering current awareness information to the firm’s attorneys via LexisNexis® Publisher, for example—and wind up being seen as a librarian who “gets it,” as one who is bringing new tools and new solutions to old problems. We’ve got to keep our minds open to finding new and more efficient ways of doing things, or we risk being sidelined. And believe me, this happens more often than it should. I’m not saying we have to jump on every bandwagon, but if you aren’t keeping yourself informed and open to change, you’ll find yourself left in the dust.
In fact, I’ve noticed an interesting fact: the happiest librarians aren’t the ones who have kept things stable for the longest amount of time. The happiest are those that continue to learn, to seek out better solutions, to find better ways of doing something. They seem engaged—and they have the respect of their colleagues in their institutions.
Learning and challenging yourself is the best way to combat the burn-out factor—and not just professionally but personally as well. Watching my 80-year-old father embrace e-mail is thrilling, even if he occasionally types in all caps or there is gobbledygook at the end of his e-mail (he hasn’t mastered “deleting” yet, so he just pushes his mistakes to the end of the e-mail and carries on. I’m pretty sure there is a life-lesson there!) I hope I, too, can continue to remain engaged and challenged, to never stop learning new things as I grow older. And really, doesn’t it make you smile to hear an older person talk about their Twitter® account or what they read on Facebook®? I love that!
That brings me to my final observation. Somewhere along the fifty-or-so milestone, one begins to think about “the future” in a different way. I suppose younger people feel as though they have all the time in the world to worry about it so it doesn’t concern them as much. As one gets older, one realizes that the future sneaks up like a very clever thief. If you aren’t paying attention, you’ll wake up and discover it has already come and gone, and you missed it. Of course, some people take the opposite approach. They are so focused on their future that they have the date of their retirement planned down to the minute. You get the feeling as though they are crossing off the days on the calendar with a big red “X.” I used to think that was what one did when one got older, that there was a master plan somewhere, that I needed to pin down all those details early on and work towards those goals, but having watched friends and relatives and their “best laid plans” not quite work out the way they expected, I’ve discovered a “truth” that I’m happy to share with you. (Another great thing about growing older is one is less reluctant to wax philosophically. “Listen to me, I have wisdom I need to impart!” It’s part of the aging process!)
So here’s my big revelation: Life will never work out exactly the way you’ve planned. It won’t necessarily be better or worse, just different. But here’s the great thing: It’s never too late to make different choices. There are so many adventures that you can miss if you hold back waiting for a master plan to be revealed to you. Instead, look for tiny interesting choices, and remember that you are always making up the future as you go.
I don’t know what lies ahead—none of us do—but I do know that, armed with this insight, getting older doesn’t seem so frightening!
