This spring I watched my youngest play many softball games. She's been playing for a few years but at seven years old she is really starting to understand the rules of the game for the first time and is asking me a lot of clarifying questions after games (or I will explain to her something I saw her missing during play). It's been interesting to try to articulate the rules of the game to her because they are something that I feel more than know. I grew up playing ball and learned the rules of the game through constant playing and repetition-- I know them in my bones. My mom was a Phys Ed major in college and a softball coach. I can remember being the age where moms play that game of rolling the ball across the carpet to their kids using their legs as bumpers because their aim is so bad-- well instead of a big rubber ball like most kids, I was wearing a tiny mitt and scooping up softballs. That's how early I started. I was probably two.
When I watch or play softball I just feel what's supposed to happen next. It's kind of like when we used to listen to CDs. There were certain albums that you listened to over and over again, and you would hear one song end and in the silence between songs your mind would already start to play the next one because you knew what was coming next. That's how I feel a play in softball- it's so rehearsed that I can feel in the silences what comes next. Yes, it's all governed by rules, but the rules are in my bones. For someone who loves articulating everything (especially intricate rules- yay lawyering!) the rules of softball have escaped that mental process for me, and I think it's because I learned by doing and also because I have held that knowledge for over thirty years now.
But that also got me to thinking about other arenas in which we learn by doing and have long-held knowledge, where intuition and long practice begins to drive behavior because we start to feel what comes next in the silences. I think that can happen even when you know the rules quite well and can articulate them. Once you have applied them enough times, over a long enough period of time, you begin to feel how they should apply to a situation, and retrofit your strategy with language that follows the well worn paths of intuition. This is what my work has become- a complex game whose rules are deep in my bones. I started acquiring my knowledge of immigration law over 17 years ago, when I was 21 years old and the frontal lobes of my brain had not yet completely formed. I have been applying that knowledge to fact patterns every day since 2001. When you play a game for long enough and encounter enough variations on how things can play out, the solutions present themselves to your mind. You just know what to do.
I should be careful to note that I do not practice law just by feeling- that would be malpractice, most likely. Once I create a strategy I review the relevant law, regulations and case law to clothe my arguments in substance and ensure that they are correct. Sometimes I realize a fatal flaw in them during that process and have to re-strategize everything, but most times the research process is a matter of fleshing out the barebones strategy that simply popped into my mind upon reviewing the facts of the case. That's what long practice gives you-- a deep intuition that is the culmination of years of addressing similar fact patterns.
I don't think there's any shortcut to acquiring practical intuition. It is always the byproduct of long experience. But what a marvel the human mind is, that it can assist us so creatively in our work, giving us an understanding that bypasses the lingual process, circumventing even the language that imparted the knowledge of the game to us in the first place. The mind truly is a wild place.
