Category: Heart

  • Are you poet enough? Creating a life that sings, for lawyers

    Are you poet enough? Creating a life that sings, for lawyers

    If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place.

    • Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

    Is your caravan lost?
    It is
    If you no longer weep from gratitude or happiness,
    Or weep
    From being cut deep with the awareness
    Of the extraordinary beauty
    That emanates from the most simple act
    And common object.

    • Hafiz

    In 1903, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke struck up a correspondence with a young man who wanted to be a poet but had to work as a clerk — which I’ve always imagined as something like a junior associate — to make a living. Those letters were published in a small volume that is a pure gem.

    Rilke’s Challenge: Are you Poet Enough?

    Rilke challenged the clerk to be “enough of a poet” to call forth the riches in his life, even as he toiled in what some might consider the most boring of professions.

    Rilke’s challenge has been an organizing principle of my life for the last 30 years or so since I read Letters to a Young Poet. As a maximizer, any challenge feels like something I should take up. And I certainly sometimes felt some kinship with the clerk , making a living at something that was not always obviously moving.

    But I believe that, whatever our job, Rilke’s challenge is a fundamental human task; part of what it means to be human at all. And it can’t be outsourced. I’m the only person who can “call forth the riches” in my life. When I fail to do that, it’s on me — not my job, my clients, the people I work with, my family, or any social, economic or political system.

    Goodness knows I’m no poet. By nature, I’m an analyzer, a thinker (and an overthinker).

    And, to be sure, many times I failed at Rilke’s challenge, and continue to fail at it. It seems like there were years — certainly months, weeks, weekends, “worthless evenings” — where there was activity, progress, success and failure, but not much song. A numb kind of gloom.

    But sometimes, on my best days, I’ve been poet enough to call forth my life’s riches. And, when I put in the effort, my legal career left plenty of fodder for “riches” to call forth. Some of the poetry I found in everyday life as a lawyer:

    • The purity of hard work. Pressing your shoulder against it and feeling it yield. What more can we ask?
    • The sun going down, or coming up, on countless conference rooms, workrooms, and offices on late nights and early mornings. We were never forsaken.
    • A team, passing a laptop around a table on a tough night. Each one contributing his or her part of the motion when none of us could do it on our own. If there is something more beautiful than that, I don’t know it.
    • Losing myself in fireflies with a colleague at the Broad in downtown Los Angeles after a judge’s scheduling change.
    • Being “cut deep” by unexpected kindness

    Becoming a better “poet”

    And so what made the difference between when I could get my life to sing and when I couldn’t? Greater confidence and agency over the course of my career probably helped. And I’ll credit eating better and exercising more with just about anything. But I think a big part of it was greater acceptance of the hard spots: uncertainty, insecurity, failure.

    Because poetry isn’t all sunsets and rainbows. Sometimes you are “cut deep” by (as Hafiz says) the “extraordinary beauty that emanates from the most simple act and common object.” And sometimes you are just cut deep – by harshness, disappointment, callousness, sadness, loss, perceived or actual failure.

    How can we be “poet enough” when we are “cut deep” in the dark places? We do it by really feeling those dark places. By declining to use our big brains to avoid those feelings, because they are part of the “riches” of life too. Sensitive people are going to be cut deep this way plenty of times in a legal career. Some of those times I remember:

    • The ritual of going to each member of the team after a disappointing defeat, to make sure they were all okay. I don’t know of a better place to put your disappointment, and will always be grateful for the colleague who introduced me to this responsibility and privilege of leadership.
    • Pacing round and round and round the 16th floor late at night after a difficult revelation from a young pro bono client.
    • That sinking, cringing feeling of finding a typo when the brief is already filed or accidentally sending an email to the wrong person.
    • Rallying myself through self-doubt and anxiety, so many times.
    • Crying in a salon chair on the day I decided I didn’t want to be a lawyer anymore. (My poor hair stylist!)

    Letting myself feel those things even though they were bad helped my brain stop spinning. Doing that helped me be a more integrated human and less of a brain in a vat. By the end of my legal career, it was almost always crescendos and violins. Sometimes dark and brooding, sometimes quick and light. But never numb. Always a bit raw and alive.

    And now that I’m no longer a lawyer, Rilke’s challenge still calls. Perhaps even more so. I can no longer pretend to blame my job, my clients, opposing counsel for my failure to feel – the responsibility is squarely on my shoulders, as it is for all of us.

  • Sound Meditation and Meaning: Beyond the Ten Thousand Things

    Sound Meditation and Meaning: Beyond the Ten Thousand Things

    wherelings whenlings
    (daughters of ifbut offspring of hopefear
    sons of unless and children of almost)
    never shall guess the dimension of

    him whose
    each
    foot likes the
    here of this earth

    whose both
    eyes
    love
    this now of the sky

    — E.E. Cummings

    Rain the desert – perfect for sound meditation!

    When I was working, the problem was always too much, never too little. The challenge was to be the kind of person E.E. Cummings describes in his poem above — who likes the here of this earth and loves this now of the sky — despite having a lot on my mind. I was never bored, or lonely, or rudderless.

    But I knew when I retired it would eventually hit me: the void that’s been there all along but obscured by the ten thousand pressing things.

    For the first months of being retired I just replaced the ten thousand pressing work-related things with my ten thousand hobbies. A gardener is never bored; there is always something to be done.

    But then I spent a month in Maine, separated from all of that. I was shocked by how quickly it came, and how profound it felt. The panic of meaninglessness. I was bored. And a bit terrified. The chill of fear that it’s all just “sound and fury signifying nothing.” If there was a shore, I could swim to it. The problem is that I don’t, really, think there is a shore.

    If you are reading this and don’t know what I’m talking about, count yourself lucky, my friend, and stop here.

    But if this sounds familiar to you, perhaps this account of a technique that helps to take me out of it might help. I’m writing this as much for me as for you, so that I can remember the way when I forget.

    Sound meditation

    What works best for me is sound meditation — noticing the sounds around me. It’s pretty simple. Here’s how to do it.

    This works best when you are at your wits’ end, feeling yourself unravel (or, better yet, feeling that you’ve never been “ravelled” in the first place). So if that’s where you are: Very good.

    You don’t have to close your eyes, but you can if you want. What you are doing is just listening to whatever there is to hear: traffic going by, a dog barking, some people talking in the distance. You are hearing and you are not trying to make sense of what you are hearing. You are hearing and you are waiting.

    What are you waiting for? You are waiting for the sounds to start to feel kind of good – like the sounds are enough. The birds and the buzz of a chainsaw are on equal footing, and both of them make you feel something kind of like a fundamental goodness of the world.
    For me at least, when conceptual judgments, analysis and predictions, (if, but, hope, fear) fall away, what remains is something that feels fundamentally good.

    When I say “fundamentally good,” I don’t mean that in a moral or aesthetic sense. The sound of that chainsaw is probably my neighbor – or more precisely the people my neighbor has hired and instructed to buzzsaw their naturally beautiful bougainvilleas into ridiculous uniform balls and squares. But when you are doing sound mediation the buzz of the chainsaw just is. You are just accepting that sound because it is. You aren’t judging that sound, or your neighbor, or their aesthetic choices.

    I’m saying this in words but you aren’t going to be feeling it in words. You are going to be feeling it in something like peace. I can’t tell you how long it will take but you will know when you are there. In Zen they say “this is such” or “this is thus.” You might just say “this is.” But you don’t need to say anything.

    Doing this sound practice while walking can also work. For me, the sound of my shoes crunching on gravel is particularly effective for bringing me into reality. Because ultimately the point is to notice and accept reality while you are walking, talking, eating, gardening, etc. To keep that peace as you walk across the street. As you buy a book, as you talk to someone.

    As you return to the ten thousand things, you are looking to find that groove where all it just feels like enough, whatever it happens to be; where each foot loves the here of this earth, and both eyes love this now of the sky.

    Why does it work?

    Doctrines, dogmas, and other castles in the air take you in the wrong direction. Because abstract thought promises permanence, but reality is impermanent. The panic comes from believing the promise. From the great Alan Watts, in the Wisdom of Insecurity: “We are perpetually frustrated because the verbal and abstract thinking of the brain gives the false impression of being able to cut loose from all finite limitations. It forgets that an infinity of anything is not a reality but an abstract concept, and persuades us that we desire this fantasy as a real goal of living.” In other words, the panic isn’t a flaw — in you, me or the Universe. It’s just misplaced expectation. Nobody can promise you a permanent forever.

    The only solution I’m aware of is to set those abstractions aside for a moment and give yourself over to noticing reality. Actual reality. Not some book (or blog post – ha!) talking about reality. That is what sound meditation aims to do. Other people might count breaths or name sensations, but all of that feels a little too close to thinking to me. My auditory pathways are further removed.

    This practice brings me back to reality and stops that panic of meaninglessness. And it also helps me to see things I would otherwise miss, and to react to people, things or circumstances with a little more genuine presence.

    But what about saving the world?

    Noticing reality doesn’t mean not trying to make changes. What I’m talking about here is a start, not an ending. It is easier to start seeing meaning in the world if you focus on something small. The idea is to keep the reality of the world squarely in focus even while you pursue some goal. The reality comes first, the abstractions that allow us to be effective come second. Well-meaning people have done truly horrible things in the name of “saving the world” when they’ve gotten that order wrong.

    And then there’s a harder question: what if the reality of the world you are experiencing is really bad – and you have no power to change it? Not just a neighbor’s horticulture error, but the kind of atrocities I’ve personally been lucky enough only to hear about? Does this kind of noticing and accepting reality work even then? I can’t claim to know for sure. But I believe the answer may be: yes, even then. Viktor Frankl, who survived 3 years in a Nazi concentration camp, believed that “life is potentially meaningful under any conditions, even those which are most miserable.” His therapy system, logotherapy, is built on the notion that meaning is found in the trees of the world, not the forest of analysis. And ultimately, for Frankl, the meaning or unavoidable reality for a particular person may involve a great deal of suffering. That’s still real.

    Right action, right thought

    The great thinker Alan Watts understood what I’m trying to get at in this post better than any human ever has or will, and articulated it in dozens of books and radio shows throughout his life. But he died an alcoholic. Perfect intellectual understanding doesn’t necessarily get you where you need to be in any particular moment. In Alcoholics Anonymous they have a saying: right thinking doesn’t produce right action but right action can produce right thinking.

    Sound meditation is not an intellectual framework — some insight of enlightenment that rearranges your whole life in an instant. It’s a practice to try when you’re unraveling. You have to keep doing it. And whatever peace or insight you might find, you can’t will yourself to hold it permanently. It comes and it goes.

    Here’s a cautionary story almost too fantastic for me to expect you to believe (but I promise it’s true!). A few weeks ago, a bobcat came and sat on the other side of my garden fence to watch me do this sound meditation. It was absolutely magic and there is no question he was looking right at me. Greedy as I am, I reached for my phone to get his picture. Of course, he immediately disappeared. All I could see was the creosote bush shaking just a little to mark his retreat.

    So, this is the kind of thing you have to keep working at. And I’m the kind of person who hates routines. But I’m starting a ten-minute-a-day sound meditation practice. Maybe ten minutes of listening can be enough to return me to the here of this earth and this now of the sky — and maybe it can be enough for you, too.

    If you try it, let me know in the comments.

  • Butterfly Wonderland and the Art of Living

    Butterfly Wonderland and the Art of Living

    You do not have to be good.
    You do not have to walk on your knees
    for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
    You only have to let the soft animal of your body
    love what it loves.

    • Mary Oliver

    Near where I live in Arizona is an attraction called Butterfly Wonderland—a magical (and a little bit kitschy) indoor rainforest in the desert, filled with butterflies. What I really love about Butterfly Wonderland is the movie they play—in a little screening room usually filled with rambunctious kids who just want to get to the butterflies already.

    It’s been the same movie for at least a decade, but I’ll never get enough of it. The movie tells the story of a monarch migration from the northern U.S. to central Mexico. It takes three generations to make the 3,000 mile trip; the first butterfly that starts off is the grandmother of the butterfly that finally makes it.

    Some people might see this movie as about grit, self-sacrifice, and social conformity: the butterflies setting aside their own individual preferences and comfort to carry out their ancestral arc and reach their destination.

    The concept of “grit” is having a bit of a moment these days. We’re told grit is the missing ingredient between a good life and a great one. But maybe that’s not grit at all—it’s just misread passion.

    My take: The butterfly movie is actually about the opposite of grit. It’s about honoring your own preferences, not sacrificing them. Sometimes that’s called intuition, or knowing and following your heart.

    Finding Direction

    We don’t have a problem with the simple explanation that the butterflies “just know” the specific spot in Mexico where conditions are right for them to overwinter, even if we can’t explain how. The answer can be just as simple for us. When we listen to—and honor—what feels right, so-called “grit” comes naturally.

    It starts with noticing what actually feels right. If we were astrologists, yoga teachers, or non-traditional medicine practitioners, we might call that “cultivating intuition.” But we are lawyers, so we don’t.

    Here’s the important part: notice how you feel about actual experiences. This isn’t the type of thing you can sit in a room and think about abstractly, or take some kind of quiz.

    When I was a practicing lawyer, there were some cases that just felt right; the narrative felt good to explain. Other times, I’d tie myself in knots forcing logic into a story that didn’t want to be told. Usually, that feeling of “trying too hard” was a warning that the case was going to be tough to win in front of a jury.

    The same “noticing what feels right” works outside the courtroom as well. My Quarterly Appreciations attempt, among other things, to demonstrate how noticing and naming what I like reoriented my life towards a kind of quality I can recognize every day.

    Sometimes that noticing leads to big changes. Ultimately, I stopped being a lawyer because I was trying too hard to integrate the demanding job with what felt right for my life—and because I’d saved enough that I didn’t need to keep trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

    But many times, honoring our preferences simply means noticing what we like about what we are already doing, or what we already know is good for us. I write about that in Rewired for Joy: How Interest-Driven People Can Learn to Love What is Good for Them. But Robert Pirsig says it better than I ever could in his 1974 classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. For Pirsig, the concept of Quality roughly equates to “what you like.” He describes what happens when a person working a dull job starts practicing Quality, i.e., paying attention to what he likes:

    If he takes whatever dull job he’s stuck with—and they are all, sooner or later, dull—and, just to keep himself amused, starts to look for options of Quality, and secretly pursues these options, just for their own sake, thus making an art out of what he is doing, he’s likely to discover that he becomes a much more interesting person … because his Quality decisions change him too. And not only the job and him, but others too because the Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didn’t think anyone was going to see is seen, and the person who sees it feels a little better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling on to others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep on going.

    I like to think that—at least some of the time—I practiced with Quality and felt the ‘fanning out like waves’ Pirsig described.

    Doing What You Like Is Revolutionary

    Maybe all of this seems pretty obvious: “Just do what you like.” But I don’t think it is obvious to many of us at all.

    When Pirsig wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in 1974, the country was split between those doing what felt good and those sacrificing for a so-called greater good (i.e., grit). That battle hasn’t ended. The world doesn’t just reward people who push through pain for some purported common goal—it depends on them.

    Many of us in the legal field find ourselves squarely in the “self sacrifice and grit” camp. We value being tough. Working hard. Doing right by our client. In a profession that glorifies the billable hour, it’s easy to forget that endurance isn’t the same as virtue.

    Honoring our own preferences doesn’t (usually) mean turning into degenerates eating bags of marshmallows while binge watching videos of cute pandas. After about the fifth marshmallow, or maybe the 50th panda video, no one’s feeling good anymore—or following their heart. Absent distorting influences like sugar, dopamine, or despair, most of us prefer to do things that are a little bit hard. Our bodies like moving against resistance (lifting weights, running), our minds like thinking against resistance (solving challenging problems). We feel more alive in those circumstances.

    But there is danger in dressing up our preferences as virtue. That confusion has us thinking that powering through means we are better people. When our judgment is clouded like that, we can’t recognize when the case should be settled, when we’ve done enough, or when our life needs to change. We’re a butterfly in winter, flying north with all our might.

    Learning to hear the voice that tells us which way to fly takes practice—especially for those of us who are logic-centered. But it’s worth it. I hear central Mexico is beautiful in winter.

  • The Fully Invested Lawyer: All Heart, No Masks

    The Fully Invested Lawyer: All Heart, No Masks

    When I started practicing law in 2002, the message was clear: keep work and life in separate boxes.

    At home, you scolded yourself for thinking about a brief. At work, for missing a birthday. Constantly jerking the leash.

    One of my law professors had us read Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. I still have my beat-up copy on my bookshelf. The main character is a butler, struggling to balance being extraordinary at his job with his human desires for love and friendship. Because, as Sartre told us, no one can really be a butler—or a waiter, or a lawyer—100 percent of the time.1

    We don’t need to debate whether that “separate boxes” model ever worked. It’s dead. It started with BlackBerries, then iPhones. Laptops. Citrix. VPNs. Each one eroded the boundary. Then COVID erased it completely.

    This presents an opportunity. We used to be told to put on different hats—lawyer hat, weekend hat. But we don’t have to live like that anymore. What we can be, 24/7, is a person who: is a lawyer, shows up for family, craves ocean air and miles on foot, and still lights up at a summer ice cream cone. The same you at the client meeting and on the couch. At the firm and on the beach. Fully invested means no more masks.

    Here’s the magic: what strengthens our hearts, minds, and relationships also sharpens our lawyering. Strong glutes protect your knees. Healthy knees keep you moving. Movement fuels your brain—and your presence in the courtroom, at the table, or with a friend in need.

    This framework change has practical impact:

    The art of the quick switch

    Common advice to set aside uninterrupted hours so you can avoid switching between tasks is nostalgic. It doesn’t work well—especially when clients and teammates are in different time zones. The key is being able to shift quickly between work and non-work tasks, while staying present in each.

    One of my best days was on a work-cation in Morocco. My friends and I got up early to run on a windy beach, with camels, horses, and kite-surfers leaping off the water—an extraordinary experience. Then I walked back to our riad to prepare for a client call. In the old days, I would have felt the need to “keep my head in the game” all morning beforehand—but that extra “worrying time” didn’t help me prepare in an effective way.

    The rise of the work-cation

    The goal is no longer to protect two sacred weeks of vacation time each year. That is not really possible anymore. Instead, I got great at the “work-cation.” Still available 24/7, still putting in long days when needed, still willing to drop everything for an emergency—but doing it all from a beautiful, inspiring place.

    I experienced more of the world, for longer stretches. And I experienced it differently: more time in local coffee shops and parks with my laptop, less time in tourist lines. Arguably, this gave me a more authentic experience.

    Fully invested means richer relationships

    Once I gave myself the freedom to engage with clients as myself—not as a simulacrum of what I thought they expected their lawyer to be—everything got better. I felt less anxious. My client relationships became richer. I became more important to my clients. The work became more productive.

    This was the best change to come from this new framework. It kept me in the job long after my finances would have allowed me to walk away.

    The Fully Invested Lawyer is aspirational. No one achieves this all the time—goodness knows I didn’t. But when things are going well, you can step back and marvel at how full, robust, and rich your life is.

    The Heart and Health sections of this blog describe the skills I learned about how to be a fully invested lawyer. In many ways, this is a love letter to my full, rich life in the law, which I left when I retired at age 47. But even now, being a lawyer is part of who I am. The skills, relationships, and energy I developed in that role continue to sustain me.

    Because when we are living as fully integrated people, we can imagine moving on. Not escaping, but reaching a point where what we’re doing today no longer serves.

    To be truly present in the reality of the human condition is to know that nothing is forever. There may come a time when we do not want to—or can’t—continue on the same path.

    The Freedom section of this blog is about gaining the financial freedom to let it go.

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    Footnotes

    ¹ Sartre wrote about mistaking your role for your life in Being and Nothingness. It’s worth a full quote:

    “Let us consider the waiter in the cafe. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes towards the patrons with a step a little too quick; he bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer… All his behavior seems to us a game. He is playing at being a waiter in a cafe.” ↩

  • Leftover Men: On Power, Grace and Seeing Yourself Clearly

    Leftover Men: On Power, Grace and Seeing Yourself Clearly

    I love to be outside in the early morning – waiting for the sun to come up, getting my run in before the heat starts. I’m a “first light” kind of person.1 When I’m out in the very early morning, it is usually just me and the fishermen setting up their lines and tackle boxes by the edge of the ocean or the banks of the river. But sometimes when you are out that early, you run into what I call the “Leftover Men”—the ones who didn’t quite make it home the night before, who seem to have just gotten up from having collapsed on the beach, or stumbled out of some hotel room

    I’m always apprehensive when I run into a “Leftover Man.” Unpredictable and perhaps with nothing to lose. And no one else around. To a person like this, I imagine a runner out early for her health, in bright running clothes and new shoes, might feel like a judgment.

    I ran into one of these “Leftover Men” once on a beach in Hilton Head. I was up in the wee hours of the morning; it was a moonless night and I wanted to see the beach transformed from pitch black by that brilliant ball of sun. I saw a young man staggering down the beach. I told myself not to be scared, not to ruin my run; he had done nothing to threaten me. But as I got closer he started calling out: “What are you doing? What are you doing?” No reason to take any chances. I turned and ran, trusting my legs to get me back to where I hoped the fisherman would be setting up by now.

    A few years later I had another, very different, encounter with a “Leftover Man” in my neighborhood in the Phoenix suburbs. I was running on the main road. There is a narrow sidewalk and a hill covered in the kind of weeds and sorry plants that crop up when the desert has been cleared but not tended. The young man coming towards me was unable to get his body to walk in a straight line. I believe he saw my eyes flick to the street, wondering if I might have time to cross over the divided four-lanes of the main road. And he saw my eyes flick back. Too many cars, and I’m not fast enough.

    Then he did something extraordinary: He stepped off the path, turned sideways to give me room, clasped his hands behind his back and nodded to me, like a gentleman from another time.

    I think about that young man often. I had judged him with my eye flick. But he wasn’t a Leftover Man. Or he wasn’t ONLY a Leftover Man. I hope that he got his strong legs back under him, and that he walks steady down the street these days.

    We all believe we’re the hero of our own story. But we rarely stop to think about how we appear in someone else’s — especially when we don’t intend to pose a threat. That young man on the beach in Hilton Head probably wasn’t any threat to me. He was probably just curious about what I was doing out so early. But he didn’t have enough self-awareness in that moment to think about how I would perceive him. The young man in Phoenix was similarly situated, but he had enough heart and perception to make it clear to me that he wasn’t a threat.

    In my career, I often felt like the staff had all of the power. They could make my copies, or not. They could fix my computer, or not. But from their perspective, I was the one with the power. A young woman from our copy center would seem to flinch every time I talked to her. I realized how she saw me: a hard-talking person who would call and complain when something went wrong. From my side, I was just trying to meet a deadline. But from hers, I was someone who could get her fired. That broke my heart a little.

    So I tried to change. Not by lowering standards, but by softening my approach. Did I have to be so hard about it? Would creating a panic help anyone? So I started using humor—clumsy jokes—in these interactions, even when I couldn’t control myself. When a Microsoft product failed to do what I wanted, I would tell the IT team: “I’m not mad at you, I’m mad at Bill Gates. He needs to get it together!” No one really thought my stupid jokes were funny, but they eased some tension. In the times when I was successful at this, and there were plenty of times when I wasn’t, I think it made everyone work more effectively. I know it was better for my heart.

    And, at the risk of stretching this story a bit too far: I rarely see other women out on the trail in the morning. It is fishermen, or Leftover Men. When I do see a woman– maybe another runner like me, or a shell-seeker, not letting any kind of fear stand in the way of being part of the pure magic you sometimes feel when the world lights up for another day–I always relax a little bit. On the trail, every woman is my sister, whether she knows it, or wants to be.

    This kind of thinking about “softening” isn’t necessarily fashionable for women in the law. We are supposed to be tough! And if we aren’t tough yet, we are supposed to pretend to be tough until we are!

    But things have always gone better for me when I treated my team more like my sisters, and my brothers. I am not ashamed to say that.

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    Footnotes:

    ¹ Important life advice: If you are looking to really see the sun come up – to have the whole experience where the sky starts to lighten, and then sometimes it turns pink and purple, and then brilliant ball of fire comes up – do not google “what time does the sun come up.” Google “what time is first light.” Otherwise you will be too late and will be left wondering what all the fuss is about.