Health / Wellness

There’s Nothing Spooky About The Law

Don’t let Halloween get you down.

By Matthew W. Schmidt  
on

As the days grow shorter and we get closer to the most exciting day of the year — when we switch off of daylight saving time and get to quietly judge anyone who calls it “daylight savings time”– first we must cross the threshold of Halloween, the spookiest of days. Halloween is a holiday that encourages mask wearing, relevant to our current times, in the spirit not of avoiding COVID-19 or other diseases, but rather an elaborate plot so ghosts don’t recognize and kill us.

But even in our modern times, the Halloween ritual remains relevant even for its traditional purpose. While, hopefully, ghosts won’t randomly attack any of us on the street — although we can never be sure — the symbolic purpose, of guarding oneself against fear, is relevant in any human society. Fear serves, as always, its evolutionary purpose of encouraging us to instinctively be ready to fight off honey badgers, wildebeests, saber-toothed tigers, overly aggressive woolly mammoths, or whatever other nightmarish megafauna our ancestors had to face down on a daily basis.

In our times, there are, thankfully, not as many violent woolly mammoths and blood-crazed saber-toothed tigers as there once were. Evolution, however, moves slowly — on a geological scale for meaningful change — leaving us still with our ancient and ancestral fight-or-flight instincts. Those instincts, however, are often ill suited to our current age. But still those instincts endure, and likely will for at least a few more millennia, so we must cope.

Thus, it’s important to always remember to center yourself and put whatever is approaching you into perspective. There are always times, and especially when you are starting out in law, when the collective instincts are triggered by any threat, making your ancient reptilian hind-brain kick in, and you respond in the same way that our ancestral cavemen 10,000 years ago would respond to a 400-pound Shasta ground sloth careening toward them at whatever the top land speed of a 400-pound ground sloth happens to be. But, thankfully, they are long extinct — no matter how much you are being yelled at by a judge for messing up in whatever spectacular manner you messed up, the judge will almost certainly not (nothing is ever guaranteed) turn into a 400-pound sloth determined to eat you. Everything will, in the end, be okay.

So, this Halloween and always, keep things in perspective. Take a deep breath, hang in there, and everything will be fine.

Matthew W Schmidt Balestriere FarielloMatthew W. Schmidt has represented and counseled clients at all stages of litigation and in numerous matters including insider trading, fiduciary duty, antitrust law, and civil RICO. He is a partner at the trial and investigations law firm Balestriere Fariello in New York, where he and his colleagues represent domestic and international clients in litigation, arbitration, appeals, and investigations. You can reach him by email at matthew.w.schmidt@balestrierefariello.com.

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