Om Shantih

The last week has floated by in a rather uneventful, rapid haze. My days seem to fall repetitively into each other, planned begrudgingly around this LSAT prep course. Nonetheless, they’re offering me a chance to reacclimate to the life I occupied before going to India, and I’m starting to realize the importance of this summer in terms of what it’s taught me about myself. Album here.

I feel as though I’m watching life happen around me as if it were a foreign language movie with subtitles. I can clearly understand what’s going on, but it comes to me filtered — and I am somehow detached. This is a difficult time because I’m having to schedule everything around the two hours of LSAT hell a day, which turns into four hours with the hour-long commute each way. I’ve found a bus route to the Princeton Review, thank God — cheaper, faster, and less of a hassle.

Needless to say, the course is frustrating me. To improve, I know I have to put in a lot of time understanding the test’s tricks and practice them until they become second nature. It’s surprisingly like my yoga practice, except exceedingly irritating. I can’t seem to find the diligence to sit down and patiently work through the problems outside of class. My mind is putting up so much resistance primarily because I’m afraid of the test.

I know I need to find the courage to confront the monster headlong. I’m already halfway through the course, and I’m not nearly as prepared as I should be at this point — I barely open the books outside of class. I won’t be taking the LSAT until February, but if my score doesn’t show substantial improvement in two weeks, the extremely expensive course will have been a waste of time and money — and I can’t really afford that kind of loss of credibility with my parents.

As I’m typing, I’m realizing that there are a lot of emotions buried beneath my distaste for this test — the fear of failure, the annoyance of having to succumb to parental expectations, the anger at my uncertainty about my suitability for law school. Sometimes I think that I would be better off teaching yoga or doing something amazing like this for the rest of my life than taking a single step into the courtroom. I know I have the mental acuity to fight difficult battles, but I really don’t know if I want to voluntarily put myself in the way of those challenges.

More than anything else, this last week has forced me to question if I really want to be that paradigmatic top 5 law school grad that gets sucked right into the corporate machine in an effort to make 6 figures a year. Nick tells me that every point gained on the LSAT equates to $10,000 over 5 years. And Ben believes it impossible that I won’t end up practicing corporate law if I do indeed become a lawyer — all dreams die eventually.

I don’t know if it’s madness on my part, but I really don’t care. Call it foolish idealism, but the reason I’m working towards a law degree at all is for the authority it signifies — and the reason I want that authority is to effect changes in the lives of people whose quality of life is compromised by inadequate legal protections. I don’t want to end up sleeping on the side of the street, but I highly doubt that I’ll be forced into that situation regardless of my eventual test score.

I want a life filled with meaning, not with worry about money.

And yet, I can hear my mom’s voice telling me that the only reason I can afford to be idealistic is that I’ve never suffered. Be that as it may, the last months have shown me that I am most content when I don’t have to engage the pettiness connected with materialistic pursuits. I no longer want to tread a path that I know generates unhappiness. But you’re in the real world now, Andy — get a grip.

On a slightly more positive note, I’m forcing myself to make time to practice yoga. In this interstitial time between the amazing summer I’ve just had and the school year to come, I find myself a bit lost in terms of time management. At both the ashram and at Princeton, my time is extremely structured — and programming my day isn’t at all hard. Here in Shanghai, I find myself distracted by worries about the LSAT and throughly exhausted after class, and finding the mental space to practice is quite difficult.

But I’m making myself practice at least one hour every other day, and sometimes more. The practice gives me hope. And it brings me forgiveness. I do feel guilty that I’m not working as hard as I know I should on the LSAT. I’m not going to lie to myself and pretend that I’m not. But the only way to eliminate that guilt is through finding the patience to eliminate its cause — and to keep up my practice.

I’ve even spent a little time teaching my friends Helena and Wiki a little of what I’ve learned — and have discovered that I really like teaching about yoga. It’s fascinating, showing friends the differences between the Western yoga and what I learned in India, showing them how they can take care of their bodies，refresh their minds and better understand themselves through the practice.

I saw my friend Amy the other day. Aside from running into her very briefly at Princeton when she visited in the spring, I haven’t seen her since last summer when were together in Shanghai. It feels like I’ve known her forever — she was the leader on my pre-orientation trip as a freshman, we taught together last summer in Pinghu, and we were lucky enough catch up over dinner together a few nights ago.

She’s been teaching English at a university in Beijing over the last year — and this next year, she’ll be personal assistant to Anne-Marie Slaughter, former Harvard Law administrator and current Princeton dean of the Woodrow Wilson School who is on sabbatical here in Shanghai. Amy’s planning on re-taking the LSAT in September and on attending law school next fall — but in the meantime, she’ll be enjoying the life in Shanghai.

We shared a lot of insights over tea, dinner, and a long walk across Shanghai — mostly talking about the various expectations and stresses we have to manage. I surprised myself when sharing what I’d learned over the summer — that life isn’t about trying to fulfill other people’s expectations or about pointless quests for societal merit badges. The more we hypnotize ourselves into the belief that material success will somehow lead to happiness, the less we are capable of tapping into our fullest potential as human beings.

We spoke at great length about yoga, about the method I’ve been taught — and the mindset I’m starting to adopt. Walking through the neon-lit People’s Square and then through the dimly-lit residential areas, just like we had a year ago, Amy remarked that I’m very different from the ill-confident, fearful freshman she knew three years back — that I’ve become an entirely different person, as if I’ve somehow shifted souls.

Towards the end of the night, we visited my DVD bootlegger friend Chen Zheng. It’s fascinating seeing friends again after time apart — makes you realize that friendship lasts despite distance, makes you evaluate the emotional distance you’ve come in the time spent apart. As I spoke with Mr. Chen about India, movies and politics, I had a strange realization that I’m happy with who I am — as in, content to be there, in his shop, chatting away with him while Amy searched through his stacks of pirated material.

I’m not quite sure where this realization came from, but it had to do, perhaps, with being in the company of two friends who I’ve known for a while — and who have watched me grow through the last years. In their memories, there exists somewhere that child Andy Chen terrified of failure and filled with self-hate — both of them have known me in my periods of deepest sorrow. And both have seen me become a very different person, more confident, more happy, more content.

This entry was quite difficult to write. It’s hard to admit that after a summer of soul-saving work, I’m finding the LSAT prep so emotionally exhausting. It’s only natural I suppose: I’m preparing for a standardized test that I have absolutely no interest in — it’s bound to be throughly frustrating.

Tomorrow afternoon, I have to take another LSAT diagnostic to measure my progress. I doubt I’ll have come very far. But all I can do is accept the results — and try to improve as much as possible over the next two weeks. I suppose that this shows me that there will be challenges ahead — and that I can only do my best in trying to confront them. The evaluation of the success of an endeavor, after all, should be based on the quality of the effort and not the end result.

I have to keep believing in this practice. And God-willing, it will continue to light my path.