Final exams.

I know that many of you first-year law students are experiencing intense anxiety over your first round of final exams. Though I am now a law professor, I was once a law student, too. The compressed horror of years spent toiling in the justice system has deadened my sensitivity to many things, but I remember how big this first set of finals feels. This isn't like undergrad, where you knew who the tough graders were and how well you were doing before you got a final exam. What if you study the wrong parts of your outline? What if you get a stomach virus? What if you oversleep or your computer freezes?

I'm here to offer some friendly advice: relax. These finals, in the context of your legal education overall, aren't nearly as important as they seem right now. What's more important, is your overall GPA at graduation. Learning the language and the culture of the law is difficult, and this first year is designed for you simply to be immersed in it, not to achieve perfection. You've got time to hone both your skills and your grades over the next two years.

Really though, your GPA isn't that big a deal either. No employer or client has ever looked at my grades. Academic performance, it must be confessed, is a poor gauge of how someone will perform as an attorney. Thus, the real prize is passing the bar exam. Focus on that.

Come to think of it, the bar exam is a goofy thing to get worked up over, too. If you fail it the first time, just take it again. You'll pass and begin your career eventually. Think of all the narcissists with their dumb slogans and square heads plastered on the sides of city buses who managed to get their law licenses. You can do it too.

And what if you don't? Are you afraid that you'll end up forgotten, with no legacy to speak of? So what? History doesn't remember many legal powerhouses because it doesn't remember that many people, period. When I last visited North Dakota, I learned a lot about Teddy Roosevelt and a little about an actor named Tom Mix, who starred in nearly 300 cowboy movies. He even had his own comic book. But I had never heard of him. It only took 70 years for him to be mostly forgotten. What I'm saying is, it doesn't make one iota of difference what you do with your career, just try to build something bigger than yourself, something that will outlive both you and your memory.

The problem with that line of thinking, though, is that even if you could label anything you'll ever do a genuine achievement, how can you possibly think it matters in the grand scheme of things? If the chronology of the universe were a football field, humankind itself would span no more than the width of Carl Sagan's hand. Even if you're the kind of person who is remembered for centuries, even if you built a philosophy, a religion, or a structure thinking it would last for ages beyond your name, your accomplishments are so easily wiped away, so mind-bogglingly finite, that they are effectively a null set.

See what I'm getting at? The grades you get on these exams just don't matter a whole hell of a lot. The prize at the end of the game, for good players, bad players, and those who elect not to play at all, is the same. We are all here, equally confused, and equally doomed to be equally forgotten.

There are two possible interpretations of these sobering truisms. The first is to accept that everything — your grades, your career, your birth, lifespan, and death — is essentially meaningless. But the second one, the one that takes a little more digging, involves recognizing that nothing is meaningless relative to anything else; on a comparative scale, your deeds (or misdeeds) will be just as memorable as any other act undertaken by any other creature.

In my experience, your ability to help, and therefore to become the most important thing in someone's world, is substantially boosted simply by possessing a law license. You kept a family from being evicted. You put some money in the pocket of someone who couldn't buy diapers the day before. You listened. You stood up for someone who has never had anyone stand up for them and you said everything would be OK, and somehow it was. What you did had all the significance of a world war, of an errant comet striking a planet, of a colliding set of galaxies. It will feel that way when you are in practice, and that feeling is not wrong.

So if your exams seem like the most important things in the universe, it might be because they are, at least at this moment, and so far as we know. Good luck, and whatever happens, know that it will soon be forgotten.

Dan Canon is a civil rights lawyer who has represented plaintiffs in landmark cases, including Obergefell v. Hodges, and a professor of law at the University of Louisville Louis D. Brandeis School of Law.