Yiayia’s Expression

-- By ArgiriosNickas - 30 Mar 2016

What I Thought it Meant

My yiayia always says: “Τα μάτια σου δεκατέσσερα.” Like many other foreign expressions, the meaning gets lost in translation: “Your eyes fourteen.” She would say it every time I left her house. She would say it every time I left to run an errand, go out with friends, or head home. If there was an occasion that involved contact with others, the expression was coming. The way I understood it was as a Greek version of “look both ways before you cross the street.” In the same way schoolchildren should need less reminders of self-preservation as they get older – I cannot remember the last time my mother told me not to talk to strangers – I thought Yiayia’s expression would fade with time. It never did.

What it Means

Recently, I asked her why she insists on reminding me, a [competent] adult, to do something, self-preservation (i.e. not get hit by cars), which should need no reminding. She explained that the expression was not meant to keep me vigilant only in a physical sense. It was meant as a spiritual warning. The ‘fourteen eyes’ are a reminder of spiritual health and to guard my heart.

For an ouzo-with-breakfast Yiayia (though I am not sure there are any other types), the advice could not have been more sagacious. Law school, Grades, New York City, EIP, Finance, Transactional Work. The list of self-corrupting mechanisms goes on and on. To be absorbed and consumed by that world would leave a hollow hull: physically functioning, but incapable of much else. Surrendering to those controls would leave psychological scars from constant splitting so deep that all the spiritual surgery in the world would be unable to mend them.

What it Means in Action: My Challenge

Realization is the first step; action is the second. I know everything in the preceding paragraph is true. I know that at any point I am only a few short steps from an unrecoverable fall down a very steep and jagged mountain. The hilarity of it is that I am so close to the precipice precisely because of my family, the same people from whom my perception of these dangers comes.

The reconciliation of my family and our society is what I, like many others I know (though that’s probably selection bias), struggle with most. It’s not unawareness or apathy to external tragedies, it’s a hereditary and social bond to the faces I know, feel safe around, am accustomed to, and love the most. It’s forcing myself to raise my eyes past an immediate horizon.

In my case, the bonds are unusually strong. I come from a family where twenty relatives get together almost every night of the week to eat dinner. Where my grandparents, first cousins, other first cousins, second cousins, other second cousins, and immediate family all lived on the same street growing up. I come from a family where every cousin gets their roman numeral, in order of birth, and the word “οικογένεια” (family) tattooed in big bold letters. A family where getting a college degree, much less one within four years, is a major accomplishment. It’s not unlike The Godfather; but we’re Greek, with less criminal ties. They all hated Fredo, and it definitely wasn’t because he wasn’t smart.

Its not that I am unaware of the consequences of a career in something like Big Law, it’s that I have done a cost/benefit analysis and have calculated that the risk of my well-being is worth the sacrifice, to provide a comfortable life to those closest to me. The bigger problem is that until very recently, I didn’t see the flaws in that reasoning.

A Start to a Solution

The problem is a failure to see more broadly. If we go along with the analogy of a cost/benefit equation, it’s a failure to see externalities. As [well-]educated lawyers we are in a position to see into the lives of others, the circumstances of the less fortunate, and the troubles of the marginalized. We are in a position to use that perspective to address those concerns. The law provides a window into the problems – through case law, lunch talks, clinics, externships – and a path to tackle them – legal representation. Yiayia’s expression is about turning your eyes to the travesties staring right back at you.

The method through which people arrive at a place where they can look past their familial sphere is sometimes different, but always a challenge. For me, I’ve started to find answers in C.S. Lewis’s World War II era broadcast talks; the methodology through which someone loves their neighbors as much as their own families is not by metaphysically willing it into existence (surely that would be impossible), but by actually adopting that love in practice.

How someone else might start to look past his or her immediate concerns will be different. It might come from a tragedy that affects them, from discourse, from a law school class, from internal reflection, or from divine intervention, if such a thing exists. The common thread is a realization of the scope of impact a person can make, that the tools through which they can make that change is available to them, and that not exercising those tools to their fullest extent is a waste of potential. That waste is a loss for the world, which is compromised of millions and billions of individuals with their own families, who have not been afforded the same opportunity a person reading or writing this has.

The solution is not caring less for one and more for another. It’s fundamentally reshaping our understanding of a lawyer’s, and therefore my own, role in civil society, where what is done to the least of us is done to all of us. I am only starting to realize that.

It's hard to object to the sentiment, but the draft feels a little over-argued to me. Our grandmothers tell us to take care of ourselves. They mean our hearts as well as our shins, our spirits and minds as well as our bodies. Selfishness is a prison in which young people sometimes put themselves. At the moment, you are reacting against that impulse.

So far so good. But, as I say, this cannot be 50 words to me and 1,000 to you without something being wrong at one or the other end. It seems to me that we ought to be reading something more than the generalities of feeling, more about the consequences of thinking.

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