It goes without saying the world has been challenging for most of us in the past year. Between the pandemic and the election, it often felt like every conversation was another opportunity to find a difference of opinion with someone. As most people in the legal field will tell you, dealing with a difference of …
Several months ago, my dad was diagnosed with a form of dementia known as Lewy Body Dementia or LBD. Looking back, we should have recognized many of the signs that are often associated with this debilitating disease. However, as is often the case in medical diagnoses, we simply didn’t recognize the symptoms, until we knew …
One of the most common reasons that people generally prefer to avoid attorneys is the fear of the unknown. How many times have you walked into an unfamiliar store and felt that twinge of uncertainty? To make matters worse, you may be instantly approached by a salesperson who asks if they can help you.
One of the questions that I have been asked many times over past several years is why I decided to become an attorney. While I am sure there are times the question has been nothing more than a conversation starter, there is a general curiosity why someone who grew up in a Beachy Amish home would make the life choice of becoming an attorney. Like so many others people’s stories, to understand how I ended up becoming an attorney, you have to understand where I have been.
Most of us have had a moment in our life that we imagined being wealthy. When I say wealthy, some of you may think about having money for a private jet. If you are like me and don’t own a private jet, you might be interested in knowing that a new private jet can cost somewhere between 5 and 70 million dollars. At some point in our life, most of us have let our minds wonder about all the great things we would do if we were wealthy in the way that we as an individual define being wealthy. This can be a fun daydream for a few minutes, but we usually come back to earth and realize that we are probably not going to own a private jet in our lifetime.
This past week one of my friends, Andy (Bims) Mast passed away. We were not friends in the traditional sense that often think of as friends. We didn’t share many common interests and outside of the occasional breakfast, we didn’t spend much time together over the past five years. Bims and I came from different generations and often had different ways of looking at the world. But despite these differences, we became friends when we worked in the same business over twenty years ago. I was a typical high school teenager who was looking for a summer job, and Bims was the seasoned employee who wasn’t sure that I would last the summer.
When is the last time you had a great conversation? Because we live in an age of texts and emails, it sometimes feels like great conversations are a thing of the past. I will be the first to say that I am a big fan of technology, especially when I can consolidate a half hour phone call into a three-word text, but all of this technology means less time having conversations. And then to further complicate matters, we seem to be living in a time when we are more divided than ever.