Yes/No. Right/Wrong. Left/Right. Party A/Party B. Science/Religion. Climate Change Believers/Climate Change Fuckwits.
What happened to nuance? Intelligent debate? ‘Blink‘ seemed to make everyone react rather than consider. I know I certainly fell into that category.
I heard a story a while back about lawyers and email. Between high school and art school, I intended to have a grand old time doing fuck all. My mother thought not so much and found a job for me in the mailroom of what was then top tier law firm Phillips Fox which no longer exists. Before the w’s and everyonewas@somethingdotwhatever, there was mail. My days were spent running around the big end of town delivering mail to and collecting from clients, barristers’ chambers and other law firms. Once I even had to serve court papers on a company but they had to be retracted when they discovered I was under 18, but I digress save to say it was a great job for four months. I also left with enough stationery and other supplies to see me through a three-year bachelor’s degree. Now and then I also had to take massive trollies of documents up to the Supreme Court and retrieve them in the afternoon… untouched.
But why lawyers like hard mail is because they were not under any pressure to reply immediately to incoming correspondence. They could the day or two to ponder all aspects of the communication then properly formulate their response by dictaphone before sending it off to the typing pool whereupon once typed it was returned to the authoring solicitor for proofing, amendments, signature and finally to yours truly to be delivered… eventually.
It is the ponder-time which is most important. That time for considered thought seems to be greatly reduced if not lost with email. Now I love email as much as the next (except for the spam which is implying both my penile function and sex life are in dire straights).
Nuance comes with considered thought. It is the ‘other’ option, the bigger idea, the better idea or as Buddhists put it, the middle way. The issue exists not only for legal practitioners. Instant gratification also means instant response. We stare at the dots while someone composes their txt reply. We get impatient when we see a text is read yet no dots are forthcoming. When I say ‘we’ I, of course, mean ‘me’ and ‘I’. When I reduced the pressure on myself to take time when replying (minutes instead of moments) I found my responses were simply better; more considered, more relevant, more valuable.
Some replies will always live in the world of white and black. Knowledge transfer. Facts and figures etc. But when I started to delay and think more, a whole world of opportunities opened up in front of me.
Rate this post: Good/Bad/Somewhere in the middle.
You must be logged in to post a comment.