THANKSGIVING: SCARCITY VERSUS ABUNDANCE

Forewarned is foretold. This is not your usual law firm Thanksgiving post.

Let’s first consider a wedding in Galilee two thousand years ago. Many have heard of the wedding at Cana. It was the occasion of Jesus’s first miracle, which some might call the most magnificent party trick of all time. The host ran out of wine - a major social faux pas in that culture. It would be seen as shameful, in fact. Jesus, a guest, stepped in. He turned jugs of water into wine. Good wine, in fact. The family’s reputation was saved. Everyone was happy. The party went on.

What’s going on here? This is supposed to be lawyer stuff. Why am I getting all squishy and religious? Shouldn’t I just be talking about being grateful?

Bear with me.

There are two ways to view the world. One is a mindset of scarcity. The other is one of abundance.

Think of life as a pie. Scarcity assumes the volume of the pie is fixed. There is only so much good to go around. Your gain is, by definition, my loss. Hence, we struggle to protect what is ours. If that means impairing the benefit of others, so be it. Our existence is a dog-eat-dog world. You must be tough.

Abundance thinking assumes that the pie can grow. We can all do better. The volume of good is not fixed. I can celebrate your gain, and you can celebrate mine. A rising tide can lift all of us.

No doubt, some are rolling their eyes right now and thinking that I am naïve. A ridiculous Pollyanna – someone utterly unrealistic.

And let’s remember, the defense of all pessimists is that they are just being “realists.”

Maybe. Maybe not.

The world can be a hard place. No doubt. I certainly can’t deny that reality. All of us must navigate multiple difficulties in our lives, frequently huge ones.

Yet, to assume that life is a zero-sum game is toxic thinking. It’s fundamentally corrosive to our souls. It’s a hopeless and anxious existence.

We are not meant to live this way, although many don’t seem to realize that.

Which brings me back to that wedding a couple of millennia ago. Turning water into good wine was not some slick stunt. It was a message of radical abundance.

But what about us lawyers operating in an adversarial system? We are duty bound to try to win for our clients. Our win means the other side has lost.

All true. We do our best for our clients. It’s our duty to try to win. Our clients deserve our best efforts to do so.

Yet, those efforts for our clients are narrow. We deal with specific issues and facts. Our role is as part of our society’s dispute resolution process. Maybe it is an imperfect one, but it is the system which tradition and law have established, relating to specific issues.

We can never forget that there is a much larger context to our world – far beyond what we do as lawyers. It’s not all about us and our lives. We forget that at our peril.

Scarcity thinking is hopelessness.

Abundance thinking brings hope.

Even lawyers can and should live with hope - a sense of abundance.