Jan 2022 – #RemoteAccessBar

Weight isn’t just a matter of physics. It’s a matter of heart.

Anyone with a smattering of physics knows there’s a difference between weight and mass.

Mass is how much of something there is. It doesn’t change. A litre of distilled water masses a kilogram. Here, on the moon, in microgravity. Everywhere.

Weight, though, is something different. We routinely talk about that water “weighing” a kilogram, because here, on this Earth, it’s true. Six trillion trillion kg of planet under our feet make sure of it.

But not elsewhere. On the Moon, the same water “weighs” a sixth as much. A human being “weighs” 10 or 15 kilos. And in space? So little it isn’t worth talking about.

In a way, therefore, “weight” is context-dependent. One could almost say it’s subjective.

I know, I know. “Subjective” doesn’t mean that.

But what I’m trying to do here is lead up to the idea that for us humans, weight is about more than just a collection of molecules. How we feel, what we know, what we don’t – all these can imbue objects with a quality which makes them heavier or lighter, even when gravity stays at 1G.

Lift your work bag on two successive days, with the same contents, and it’ll feel different. A meeting you dread or a lunch you’ll love? A task that counts or drudgery that doesn’t? One day: light. The next: leaden.

But sometimes extra weight isn’t a burden. It’s a sign of how much something matters.

For most of us, there are things which define who we are. There are people, of course, thank goodness: those we love, those who love us. But there are things we do. Actions, activities, obsessions. The things which – if they were taken away from us – would leave us only partially there. Robbed. Even bereft.

I know what these are for me, because I spent years without them. No-one’s fault but my own. They weren’t taken away; I let them slip away from me. Told myself I was too busy. Family, work, no time for anything else.

And I paid. I became a smaller, sadder, sorrier person. More tired. More worn. Worst of all, someone with less of myself to give to others.

One is music. Long-term readers will recall I’m a piano player (never a pianist – nowhere near good enough to say that). I didn’t play for years. I don’t play every day now – but most days I do, and I know that I’m the better for having it back in my life.

The other, though, is capoeira. A martial art suffused with music. Born in Brazil, now worldwide. I first tried it almost 25 years ago. Then I played, solidly, for up to five or six hours a week, for several years around the year 2000. I loved it. It fed me. The physicality, the flexibility, the sense of energy and community and communication. Like nothing on earth. I took gradings. Became a senior student, with a blue belt.

Then, for years, I let it slip. Life. Work. Excuses.

Then, after we moved out of London, I discovered our new home had its own capoeira school, Brazilarte. I started training in 2019. Mestre Biscuim and Contra-mestra Sininha, its founders, became friends. They became family. And through the mad months of Covid, capoeira helped keep me sane. Kept me breathing.

In the two years I trained with Brazilarte – not always regularly, as work and family crises sometimes got in the way – I never wore a belt. It didn’t feel right, wearing one from so long ago. And thanks to the pandemic, there was no chance for a batizado (what we call a grading; literally, a “baptism”) at which I could earn one anew.

Not till last November. The Brazilarte Batizado was a celebration: of capoeira, of survival, of community. It was wonderful.

And at the end, Sininha tied this round my waist. A mark of family. Of belonging. Of faith and love. Of my return to capoeira as though I’d never left. Even of a kind of forgiveness for the times I’d let myself walk away.

And of an obligation – it being an instructor’s belt – to share the love with whoever I could.

And just for a moment, my knees sagged. My mind knew the belt massed a couple of hundred grams. My soul knew it weighed far, far more.

Today’s the first training session of 2022. This evening I hope I’ll feel my belt’s true weight. It may not be what I deserve. But I know it’s what I need.

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The best and worst things in life. They trip you up, if missed. They redeem your soul, if marked.

*The view down my Chambers’ stairs. It caught my eye one morning; a welcome moment of delight.*

This isn’t a New Year’s resolution. I don’t do them, as a rule.

Nor is it a review of the year, or an anticipation of the one we’re entering. If the past couple of years have shown us anything, it’s that foresight is, for most of us at least, a mug’s game.

No. It’s a very short musing on the one thing that has both screwed me and saved me over the mad months we’ve gone through. And that’s detail.

From a professional perspective, of course, this isn’t news. Central to the work of the professional advocate is a mastery of detail. We’ve all lost cases because the import of some point, spotted by the other side in hundreds or thousands of pages of evidence, somehow passed us by. And equally, we’ve all come across that one critical item (occasionally in a final read-through on the train to court) which puts everything else into a winning context. Not in every case, of course. But more often than one might think.

But personally too. There have been times amid the madness when I’ve found myself pulling in. Closing down my peripheral vision, my proprioception. Letting my natural introversion (and I wonder – prompted by the comments at least half a dozen people close to me – possibly a smidge of being on the spectrum too) overtake me, blotting out little things that others do, or say, or leave undone or unsaid. Missing those critical little details which if spotted would scream, to an actively-listening mind, that someone else’s inner state needs to be attended to.

That way leads to isolation. Sadness for self and others.

Just as bad: when one walks down the road so absorbed in oneself that one misses the tiny details that feed your soul. Winter morning light on the river. A song drifting from a window that you’ve not heard for a decade or two. An innocent smile from a stranger whom you let pass. The things which may only ease your burden by a few grammes – but they add up.

Particularly when the big picture can be so dark, so unpredictable, so damned foolish and selfish much of the time, it seems to me that the details are still more important. Professional. Personal. Environmental.

OK. So maybe a bit of a resolution. Make time for the details. My soul will be the better for it. Perhaps yours will too.

(If you’d like to read more like this, and would prefer it simply to land in your inbox, please go ahead and subscribe at https://remoteaccessbar.substack.com/.)