Waking Up

My eyes flutter open to the darkness
As I wake up in the habit of my species,
Carving a morning out of nature's long sleep
With rote activity.

But this is the first day of the year when,
Stepping out into the gray hours,
A hundred wings invisible to me
Are fluttering as the birds,
Who in the habit of their species have returned,
Begin to carve their songs into the morning.

Space to Play

My six-year-old recently asked me if being a grown-up was very boring because you never get to play. I explained that some grown ups don't play any more but that most of us do it all the time; it just looks different. We talked about what is the most fun kind of playing, and agreed that it's those times where you come up with an idea to do something that you end up doing for a really long time and it seems like you are in another world while you're doing it. You get lost in your imagination. Kids instinctively look for those experiences through play; they tirelessly try new activities until they hit on something that's absorbing. They are always looking to lose themselves. I think we do the same thing as grown-ups, with work, relationships, and hobbies. But we tire more easily and accept mindless substitutes and mental shortcuts more readily. If we become accustomed to accepting those substitutes too regularly and make them our daily habits, we begin to lose our ability to play, but we don't need to.

One of the keys to maintaining that sense of imagination and playfulness is maintaining a certain amount of detachment from your own life. There is a series of wonderful images in the Tao Te Ching that has always stuck with me:

Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful. ...

I think of the details of my life as necessary structures to house what is really its essence, and like I am always working on hollowing out the spaces in my daily routine to give space for reflection and creativity. It is only when I make the space to play inside of these activities that my genuine self can infuse them. But by infusing them, they still never become any more permanent or irreplaceable.

It's important to recognize that the shape of my daily life and all of the people and activities that populate it are just one of an infinite array of possibilities, and that as pieces of the structure inevitably fade or wear away and need to be replaced, what is important to remaining vital is that whatever life's circumstances may be, I can always craft them into a shape in which they provide a structure, however rich or shabby, with enough space in it that I can still play. 

Helping Competitors

I tend to gravitate toward competitive pursuits. I practice law and I run races. I like to push myself toward becoming continually better at both, and I also like the feeling of beating out my competition. But I also truly love my competitors and consider them some of my best friends. The better they are or the more they excel in a way I haven't considered, the more I admire and want to learn from them. But I don't just want to learn from them so I can beat them. I also want to encourage and help them. I want to help everyone achieve their personal best in these endeavors and I truly rejoice with those who do, even when it means they outstrip me. Why?

I think that everyone has a certain amount of potential in any given endeavor and that when everyone reaches their full potential, we all do better. There are a couple of reasons for this:

1. The individual successes of anyone who pursues an activity elevates the prestige of the entire field. When a runner does something amazing and a newspaper picks up the story, anyone associated with running feels a personal connection to the story and participates in the good feelings as they read it and as people who they know discuss it.

2. There are very few people who are capable of making true innovations in any field. Those people change the entire future of the field for those who follow. I personally want to create an environment in which the Einsteins of my profession can push the boundaries forward, even if that does not happen to be me.

There are other, practical reasons for helping competitors to succeed. First, helping others exposes you to solving problems that you have not yet encountered and helps to prepare you to meet them when they arise. I frequently talk other attorneys through difficult cases and as I do so, I often encounter fact patterns that I have not seen in my own practice. This gives me the opportunity to learn as I teach. Second, by virtue of helping others, I become seen as a leader in the field (which often means that other attorneys refer cases to me that are too difficult for them to handle). Third, by helping other attorneys, I help to prevent their malpractice, which again elevates the entire profession. (Who wants to be associated with a field in which there is a public outcry against professional incompetence?)

I often encounter people who treat competitive pursuits as a zero sum game in which all spoils go to the victor. But I have never experienced more camaraderie than among those fields in which sportsmanlike competition is involved. True competition is a group endeavor in which a group of very talented, skilled people work together to push every individual to their personal best.

The Things They Tell Me...

I. Snake (6)

We were driving in the car when she said out of nowhere, "How many people do you think are on the earth?"

"I don't really know," I replied, with some curiosity.

"I think it's infinity," she said with finality, having clearly established the answer in her mind before ever asking me.

"It can't be infinity," I  said, "because there's always an exact number."

"But does anyone know the number?"

"Well, not really, because at any given moment, there are always people being born and dying. No one could possibly keep count."

"Is that infinity?"

"If it's not, it's something a lot like it."
******

II. Natalie (3)

She was brushing her teeth when I chided her, "Don't stick your toothbrush down those little holes! There's dirt in there!"

"But Mother," she laughed, "there's an animal that's stuck in there and he's talking to me."

As I washed her brush out, I told her, "You know, when I was a little girl I used to believe there was a tiny family living down the drain of my bathroom sink, and I used to feed them water."

"I think at that point," she mused thoughtfully, "I was an old lady."

This was not the first time she had referred to her idea that our ages will always exist in some transverse relationship. Every time I mention that she'll be a lady some day, she tells me, "That's when you'll be a little girl!" I've never corrected her; I just keep waiting to hear the idea fleshed out more as her imagination grows.

"You think so?" I asked her.

"Yeah, I do," she said seriously.

******

Our imaginations walk before us.

Our imaginations walk before us. We cannot engage in even the simplest act without having first imagined ourselves doing it. If I so much as turn on a light at dusk as I sit reading, my mind has already imagined the feeling of putting my bare, tucked in feet back into my slippers and walking the few steps to the light switch. This forethought unfolds so automatically, weighing the consequences of potential behaviors, that I barely realize that the decision as to when to perform this simple act entails weighing a sense of when would be the best stopping point; a complex calculus of how quickly the light is fading and how wrapped up I am in the flow of the book is unraveled with the seeming ease of Bobby Fisher making a move at chess. And suddenly I act, and the tiny denoument of an executed decision becomes a forgotten texture of my emotional make-up for the day. So much of our lives, however exciting or mundane on the surface, plays out in the silent music of our minds humming away, unnoticed. The only way I feel fully alive is to notice. And we can.

And this is the smallest of scales. We are always in the process of making layers and layers of decisions, from the small things like turning a light on or off, to strategies for handling the difficult people who populate our lives and how better to consider them, to what habits we should strengthen and which we should weaken, to whom we want to become and how others see us. Our minds are constantly working away at these things. One rises to the surface and another recedes; we prioritize them, order our intentions. We meta-decide how to decide what we will do, and this is how we become. We are the pattern of our choices.

Overheard

Two conversations overheard today while I was waiting:

(1) Two men in business suits, moving with gestures reminiscent of two buddies at a ball game, sit across from one another sipping coffee and remarking on how they haven't seen each other since high school, when they played hockey together and would gather in someone's big kitchen. They compare notes on how it felt to clear out their parents' belongings from their houses after they passed away, working with their siblings on the final act of childhood. Then one's cell phone rings and he talks about a property down in Ellicottville- it becomes clear he is a lawyer for the property owner, and he's advising his client to better cover up an open foundation for the winter so that a child does not fall in. He apologizes to his childhood friend, explaining that he can never get this client on the phone and that he needed to seize the opportunity. His friend responds with genuine sympathy. They sip. They are both lawyers.

(2) A man with shoulder length white hair and foam letters adorning the back of his tan corduroy blazer reading, "Jesus saves" walks up to two similarly aged women who are nibbling at eggy breakfast sandwiches as seagulls swarm outside the window in a grey sky. "Mind if I sit here?" They say yes politely, one through fuchsia and one through rouge lipstick. He tells them of a woman he talked to. He asked her, "Do you need to be saved?" and she said no-- can you believe it? All three shake their heads, sip their coffee.

How Lawyers Handle the Truth

After I graduated from college with an English degree and no real career plans, I ended up working as a paralegal at an immigration law firm, based on an ad that sought out individuals with creative writing skills. I admit to being skeptical at first as to why creativity would be required to do legal writing; I assumed at first that the lawyer wanted someone willing to bend the truth. So I asked about this in my interview, and the lawyer (now my boss of 12 years) explained to me, with some bemusement, that creativity in legal writing means something different than what might normally be considered "creative writing."

It was only after working as a paralegal for a couple of years that I understood more fully what the lawyer's role is, and why creative thinking (more than creative writing) is required for the job. Around that same time, I decided to go to law school.

Since then, I've become more sensitive to the way the legal profession is portrayed by the media, fostering the popular (and perhaps somewhat deserved) conception of lawyers as being concerned more at getting a lot of money for their clients and/or themselves than for getting at the truth or ensuring a fair outcome. But from my day to day work in the field, I have seen another side to the story that often goes overlooked.

I recently served as a guest lecturer at a local college. The class is a survey of Professional Writing, and features guest lecturers of various professions, all of whom give the students a writing assignment typical for their field. I asked the students to draft a legal brief, and explained how it is done. I reviewed the papers when they were done, and was pleased that most of the students had properly constructed the legal argument, explaining why a fictional client, despite having been charged for theft, remained admissible to the United States. However, I later learned from the professor that the students were troubled by the assignment because they felt that the person really should not be admitted to the country, but were forced to argue otherwise.

This type of thinking, the belief that one's personal moral intuition should be trusted as a more reliable guide for the administration of justice than a formal legal system, lies at the heart of people's mistrust of lawyers.  If these same people thought about it more deeply, they would distrust the entire notion of having a legal system based on the concept of impartiality at all.

The reason the fictional client in our hypothetical case remained admissible to the U.S. is because the formal charges against her were dropped and she never was convicted of the crime. The law only makes people inadmissible to the U.S. based on crimes of which they actually were convicted or of which they admit to having committed. And for those who are convicted of crimes, only certain crimes make them inadmissible. The law provides for many exceptions. The purpose of this labyrinth of rules is to ensure that truly dangerous individuals are not allowed into the country, but to allow most otherwise-qualified people to enter the country.

A fundamental concept in determining admissibility for those with criminal convictions is that the adjudicator cannot look behind the record of conviction. In most cases, the government officer determining admissibility is only permitted to review the statute under which the alien was convicted to determine whether the crime, as defined by the statute, is one that prevents an alien from entering the country. This is an important safeguard as it ensures that rules will be applied mechanically. It also shields the adjudicator from hearing the narrative surrounding the course of events that led to the arrest and conviction; narratives can powerfully affect one's opinion of how "bad" a crime is. But allowing the officer to look at the narrative would subject the alien to a second determination on culpability for the offense, a process that should occur only once, and in the context of the criminal proceeding. The determination of admissibility to the U.S. is not a redetermination of moral culpability for a crime; it is simply a determination as to whether someone so convicted ought to be permitted to enter the U.S.

One of the foundational principles of our legal system is impartiality in the administration of justice, and this is often achieved through the control of information that is given to decision-makers. We artificially strip narratives down to relevant facts so that legal principles can be appropriately applied. While additional facts may yield a different outcome, that is often because it is based on emotions aroused by the narrative rather than by carefully considered and balanced interests.

Because lawyers' job is to package information in this calculatedly artificial manner for judges, juries, adjudicators, and the like, we are often viewed as manufacturing a false version of reality. While it is true that the version of the facts that we create is artificially stripped down, this is done for a very important reason. We shear away the facts that are not relevant to the legal issue at hand. We mine the dense narratives presented by our clients for the legal issue. Once the issue is clear, there is a very limited set of relevant facts to be presented. This may be artificial, but the alternative is to determine guilt and innocence by mob rule or by the feelings of a single or a small group of individuals bent on protecting their own interest.

The administration of justice, the finding of culpability for crimes, is never a pretty business. There are very few ways of doing it, and modern society's system, based on impartiality, may not be perfect but it safeguards individuals' liberty, ensures fairness and equality before the law, and prevents decisions based purely on emotion. It could be a lot worse.