Scary times, if you’re paying attention. Easy to give up on kindness, easy to prefer a good show, a good beach, a nice rock to hide under.
Scary times, if you’re paying attention. Easy to give up on kindness, easy to prefer a good show, a good beach, a nice rock to hide under.
Wake Up Call #367: Turning the Destiny of a Nation
Hi everyone, it’s Judi Cohen and this is Wake Up Call 367. I know I said last week we were moving on to the paramita of patience today. But I was reading something about ethical conduct and want to take one more Wake Up Call to share it.
One of the key precepts – maybe the key precept for lawyers – is wise speech. Wise speech is also a step on the Eightfold Path, or the path to freedom and liberation. It’s the step that maybe affects others the most directly.
Wise speech has a few elements. It’s true. Already that’s a challenge for lawyers because how do you say what’s true in a settlement negotiation? It’s helpful rather than being manipulative or mean or anything but helpful; and, there are a lot of examples in the profession of folks who say a lot of things that aren’t helpful. It’s interconnected – it acknowledges we’re all in this together. That’s something it’s easy to forget when the adversary system points us in the exact opposite direction. It’s necessary, and I don’t know about you but that probably eliminates about half of what I say, at least. And it’s kind.
Kindness is where I get the most pushback from lawyers. There’s this big question that arises: can I be a passionate advocate and still speak kindly? Won’t I get run over by the proverbial Mack truck?
It’s a reasonable question, and also the reason I wanted to stay with sila paramita, or the paramita of ethics, for one more Wake Up Call.
In one way, it’s a reasonable fear, or not an unreasonable fear, that if I use kind speech – meaning I talk to everyone kindly, someone will take advantage of me. That “someone” might be the other side but considering how cutthroat things can be, it also could be an associate or staff member or partner. I had a colleague say something very unkind about me and it was very detrimental to my career.
I think clients worry a lot about this, too. They want an aggressive lawyer. To them, that often looks like someone who isn’t particularly kind, but rather uses a lot of zingers and gotchas! in a negotiation or even in the courtroom.
As a woman there’s a kind of double-jeopardy. Not only might all those things be true, but I also might be perceived as incapable because kindness looks or sounds too feminine to stand up to the “big boys.” If I’m queer or non-binary, I’m guessing it’s the same issue: other lawyers, and judges, may mistake kindness for weakness.
On the other hand – the double-jeopardy of it – if I’m a woman and I’m tough, there are all sorts of names I might be called (and I have been called) that point to aggression as unappealing and even unacceptable in a woman, and maybe that’s also true for queer or non-binary folks, too.
The world is a complicated place.
And yet.
With the paramitas, remember we’re talking about the Boddhisattva ideal. This ideal is one of limitless generosity, morality, patience, love, and so forth, in service of others. And it is an ideal – probably none of us will live up to it (or at least I know I won’t). But it’s still an ideal worth dedicating our lives to.
In a way, as lawyers, we already have. We’ve dedicated ourselves to serving others. We made that decision when we sent in our acceptance letter, or took out our student loan, or sat in all those classes or took the bar or whatever milestone moment signified, for each of us, taking on the mantle of the law. We can’t go back. We can retire. We can quit the practice. But we’re always MOTs, members of the tribe…of the law. And as members of that tribe, we are already Bodhisattvas – dedicated to serving others.
The only real question is, what will that service look like? Will it be offered with an open heart, with love, with selflessness, patience (which is up next), compassion? Or will it be offered in a kind of frenzy of breathlessness, overwhelm, anxiety, and exhaustion. Maybe we’ve all been in both places. I know I have.
The thing is, if we choose the Bodhisattva path, that service has to look like love. Our communication has to be kind. Always. Every time. Every word.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying I know how to do this. That’s what Norman Fischer is talking about in The World Could Be Otherwise when he says we have to imagine ourselves on the other shore: practicing the paramitas is about crossing over from greed, hatred, delusion, depression, overwhelm and the like, to compassion and love, and to make that crossing, we have to be able to imagine ourselves on the other shore. And part of that is speaking kindly to everyone. In fact, Norman quotes Dogen, the founder of the Soto Zen tradition in which he and millions of folks practice, as saying, “You should speak to sentient beings as you would to a baby.”
I’m pretty sure he doesn’t mean in a condescending way, as if the baby doesn’t understand. He means in a deeply loving and joyful way, the way you speak to your very own baby on the day they’re born.
And, Norman says, Dogen goes further. He admonishes us to, “offer kind speech, especially to those without virtue. We think that people without virtue don’t deserve our kind words. We should condemn or criticize them, or at least relate to them neutrally. Why speak kindly to a nasty and unappealing person? Who does that? But Dogen says the opposite: if you offer kind speech to such a person, you will be amazed at its power; virtue will grow where you thought there was none. Do not ever give up on kind speech; trust it, world after world, lifetime after lifetime. ‘Kind speech,’ [Dogen] concludes, ‘has the power to turn the destiny of the nation.’”
We lawyers are in charge of a lot – in some ways we’re in charge of the nation. Do we have the power to turn the destiny of the nation? If we do, best bring our mindfulness and kindness, shouldn’t we get going?
Let’s sit.
[Play the John Lennon Imagine video at the end of the Paramitas – whenever that is! (It’s bookmarked under Music.)]