There are things I miss about being a student that I never expected to miss. It is not the examinations or the long nights spent worrying about deadlines, nor even the peculiar uncertainty of not knowing exactly what would come after graduation. What I sometimes miss is the sense of spaciousness that existed around those uncertainties. Even when college felt overwhelming, there was always a feeling that there was time left to figure things out, to change one’s mind, to read something simply because it was interesting, or to spend an afternoon doing very little without feeling that something else was being neglected.
Since finishing law school and beginning to work, I have found myself thinking about that feeling rather often. I am grateful for the opportunity to begin practicing and for the responsibilities that come with becoming a young professional, but the transition has not been entirely easy. There is a particular kind of anxiety that comes with entering working life when one is still trying to understand what kind of professional one wants to become. The days are filled with things that need to be done, documents that need to be read, deadlines that need to be remembered, and conversations that require preparation. There is always something that can be done, and therefore it can sometimes feel as though there is always something that I should be doing.
I noticed this most clearly a few weeks ago, on an evening when I had spent the better part of the day thinking about work and the next day’s responsibilities. I was tired, but not quite tired enough to sleep, and I found myself worrying about all the things that I had not yet done. I eventually did what I have always done when I am unable to quiet my mind: I picked up a book.
Reading has been my most reliable form of escape for as long as I can remember. It is one of the few things I have managed to preserve from my life before work, and perhaps one of the few things I still do without asking whether it is productive. I can read history, philosophy, literature, or something entirely unrelated to law simply because I want to understand it. On that evening, while moving between books and essays, I came across the Chinese concept of jing (静), usually translated as stillness, quietness, or tranquility.
The idea stayed with me because I had initially understood stillness rather differently. I had always thought of it as what happened when one’s responsibilities were temporarily over: the quiet after the work had been finished, the holiday after the deadline, the weekend after a difficult week. But in the Chinese philosophical traditions in which the idea appears, stillness can carry a much deeper meaning. In Confucian thought, quietness is associated with the cultivation of the self and the ordering of one’s inner life; in Daoist thought, stillness can suggest a way of responding to the world without constantly attempting to force it into the shape one wants. It is not necessarily withdrawal from life, but a different way of being present within it.
I found myself thinking about how little of my working life had actually been still. Even when I was not working, I was often thinking about work. When I was reading, I sometimes wondered whether what I was reading could become an article. When I was writing, I was already thinking about what needed to be written next. There was always another deadline, another application, another professional opportunity, or another piece of work somewhere at the edge of my attention. I had begun to treat time almost as a legal resource: something to be allocated, accounted for, and used as efficiently as possible.
That instinct is not entirely surprising. Legal training teaches one to think in terms of consequences. One reads a provision and asks what follows from it; one encounters a fact and begins to think about its implications; one is presented with a problem and immediately starts looking for the rule that might resolve it. Working in the profession only strengthens that habit. There is considerable value in learning to anticipate problems before they arise, but I have begun to wonder whether the same habit can make ordinary life unnecessarily exhausting. Not every uncertainty is a problem waiting for an argument, and not every unresolved matter needs to be resolved immediately.
This was where jing became meaningful to me. I began to think of stillness not as doing nothing, but as resisting the instinct to constantly intervene. There are moments in professional life when one must act quickly and decisively, but there are also moments when the wiser response is to allow something to remain unfinished for a while. An email can wait until morning. A difficult decision can sometimes be considered without immediately producing an answer. A period of uncertainty does not necessarily mean that something has gone wrong. There is a certain humility in accepting that not every part of one’s life can be controlled through effort.
I found this particularly interesting because it reminded me, in an entirely different vocabulary, of something familiar from Christian thought. Christianity has always had a complicated relationship with waiting. So much of the language of faith involves waiting for something that has not yet arrived, trusting without knowing exactly how circumstances will unfold, and accepting that human effort is not the sole measure of what matters. The Christian understanding of vocation, too, is not simply about achievement. It asks us to consider how we inhabit the responsibilities entrusted to us and what kind of people those responsibilities are making us.
I do not think jing and Christian stillness are the same idea, and I would not want to collapse distinct traditions into a convenient similarity. What interested me was the possibility of recognition without equivalence. Sometimes another tradition gives us language for something we have encountered in our own lives but have not yet been able to articulate clearly. Reading about stillness in a Chinese philosophical context made me reconsider something I thought I already understood.
Perhaps this is one of the unexpected pleasures of reading across cultures. We often approach China, particularly from India, through large subjects: history, politics, economics, borders, diplomacy, and the many complicated relationships between our two countries. These subjects matter, but they can also make China feel like an abstraction rather than a place inhabited by people who, like us, are trying to understand how to live ordinary lives. Literature and philosophy offer a different kind of encounter. They allow one to meet an idea before turning it into an argument about a country or a civilization.
I had written my earlier ChinaSource piece when I was still in college, after an ordinary encounter with a visitor from Guangdong led me to reflect on he (和), harmony, and li (礼), the attentiveness to others expressed through everyday conduct. At the time, I was still a student, and my reflections were shaped by the particular world I inhabited then. I was thinking about cultural differences, kindness, and the possibility of finding common ground between people who had very little in common on the surface. I did not know then that I would later return to Chinese thought from such a different stage of my own life.
Now, having finished law school and begun working, I find that my questions are somewhat different. I am less concerned with whether I have enough time and more conscious of how quickly time seems to pass. I am learning that professional life does not necessarily become less demanding as one becomes more capable; often, one’s capacity simply creates room for greater responsibility. There is always another matter to understand, another skill to develop, and another version of oneself that seems to be waiting somewhere in the future.
That can be exciting, but it can also be unsettling. I sometimes find myself looking back at college and remembering how manageable life seemed in retrospect, even though I certainly did not feel that way at the time. Perhaps every stage of life acquires that quality once we have moved beyond it. We remember the freedom more clearly than the anxiety that accompanied it.
Reading about jing did not make those anxieties disappear, nor do I think that reading is supposed to provide such convenient solutions. What it gave me instead was a way of thinking about them. I have started to wonder whether becoming a professional should not simply mean learning to carry more, but also learning what does not need to be carried all the time.
That has changed the way I think about reading as well. I have always regarded books as companions, but increasingly I think they are also forms of conversation across time and culture. A Chinese philosopher writing centuries ago cannot know anything about my particular deadlines, my work, or my anxieties, and yet an idea from that tradition can still make me pause in the middle of an ordinary working week and reconsider the way I have been living it.
For someone beginning a professional life, that pause feels increasingly valuable. The world of work encourages movement, ambition, and constant improvement, all of which have their place. But there is also something to be said for retaining the ability to sit quietly with a book, to let a thought develop without immediately turning it into an outcome, and to accept that some things in life become clearer only when we stop trying so hard to make them clear.
I am still learning how to do this. I still worry about work, still make lists of things that need to be done, and still find myself thinking about tomorrow when I should probably be paying attention to today. But when the pace becomes particularly overwhelming, I now remember the word jing and the idea behind it. It reminds me that stillness does not have to be an escape from responsibility. It can be a way of returning to one’s responsibilities with greater patience, attention, and perspective.
Perhaps that is what I needed to learn at this particular stage of my life. When I was a student, I thought becoming a lawyer would mean finally knowing what I was doing. Having arrived at the beginning of that life, I am discovering that adulthood and professional life are less about reaching a point at which everything becomes certain and more about learning to live well despite the uncertainty. For now, I am finding that one of the best ways I know to do that is still the simplest: to read, to pause, and occasionally to allow myself to be still.
