Even when I have a damn good case, there are times when I argue myself down into a small puddle of whimper, which is the reason why The Buddha and I have all these epic discussions when we are filing submissions for anything. He keeps going up up up and I keep bringing him down down down. For every proposition he makes, I will give him a differing viewpoint, until he gets so incredibly frustrated that he shouts at me. After that we laugh and make up and file the submissions anyway, cross our fingers and hope for the best. Then on the day of the judgement, we will make our way to Court together with him hopeful and me usually quite ambivalent. He has stopped asking me why I am such a wet blanket. And the judgements we receive are usually somewhere between his hope and my ambivalence and entirely within our collective reasonable contemplations.

I don’t for a moment consider myself a pessimist. In spite of everything that I say or do, I actually carry around a lot of hope with me, even though I may have been disappointed many times in the past. My mind is just fixed in such a way that I tend to consider every single permutation of any single event at any time. It’s like I am programmed to run like a Choose Your Own Ending Book. Something happens and I automatically see it from the perspective of three different people.

There was a point of time in my life where I find myself unable to block out the perspectives of the two other people and proceed one way but then I trained myself over the years to do so.

That doesn’t mean that the other two perspectives are any less real in my head. No matter what I do, they are there all the time and they trouble me anyway, sometimes enough to upset me for a while.

But then it all hurts to a point down there somewhere and then it stops, to borrow a description from Ayn Rand.

As such, over time, I have come to appreciate that a lot of things are not just black and white or yes and no. In order to advise someone fully on any given occasion, one has to be nothing short of acutely aware of all the layers and nuances in the relationship between the people involved. Just taking a hard position doesn’t always solve problems or help things along. There are many times in life that the answer should be no. But the heart does not permit you to take that position. You bitch about it. The person you bitch to rolls her eyes and told you that you should have just said no. But it is not so simple. Getting along with people is never simple.

That’s why we never say you will win. We say you may win. We never say it is. We always say it would appear to be. You may think that we are just shifty and non-committal, but we are just trying to be as accurate as possible.

A while ago I did a criminal matter with The Socialist where our client was having great difficulties understanding that although he would most probably end up having to pay a fine only, there is an off chance he may land up in jail for the offence as the statute books provided for both. We sat in conversation with him on three different occasions explaining to him in great detail and bad Chinese. He just kept insisting that we guarantee that he will stay out of jail. At the end of the third day, he finally understood and signed the instruction sheet.

He pleaded guilty and we did the mitigation and he was issued only a fine and stayed out of jail, as expected.

Anyone would say that the three days spent explaining to him about the off chance that he may land up in jail was a royal waste of time but the 3 days was the difference between being accurate and being wrong.

A Senior Counsel once told me that after about five years in practice, you’d wake up one morning and have an epiphany. Something inside will go ‘click’ in your head and you suddenly understand everything that you do with a clarity that is previously lacking.

I think the above is a part of my epiphany.

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