"Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?' – Mary Oliver

   Poet Roger Housden follows Oliver's piercing line a question that can define your days: "Have you ever longed for a life in which every last part of you is entirely used up?"

   Are fear or ennui causing you to leave your finest gifts hidden until you die?

   In your experience of this moment, what memories are you creating to add to the row of your recollections? Are you breathing full or taking a string of shallow breaths?

   Trained as a trial lawyer, I find that too many of my memories have involved advancing my views.

   I continue to practice the ethic of my profession even though I put aside the active practice of law decades ago. Advocacy has been as useful to me in running hospitals as it was in courtrooms.  

   Advocacy can be just as useful if you engage in dialogues of persuasion rather than monologues of making points. My son, a noted Boston trial attorney, offered a reflection. It is hard-mined gold I pass along to you.

   If your sole purpose is to make your point, you will likely fail, he advises. The problem with "point-making" is that it advances your agenda and ignores theirs. 

   If your goal is to persuade consider not your point but their point of view. 

   Try to win an argument and you will lose what matters. I have sometimes impressed myself with how brilliantly I have argued my position only to discover that I alienated the person before me. 

   As you create your memories of now, remember what I often forget: The goal in caring relationships  is not to triumph. Humanity is not won with legalistic reasoning.

   Love cares nothing about winning. 

  -Erie Chapman 

Photograph: "Picket Fence" erie chapman