hope – #RemoteAccessBar

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.

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A friend made me cry over the weekend. I can’t thank him enough.

That guy. Best wishes to him, whoever he is and wherever he is. https://t.co/tJIZiJAen0
— 🌍 Andrew Marshall 🌎 (@Consultifi) June 5, 2021

Short thought: It was the bags that did it for me.

An old friend, Andy Marshall, posted to his Twitter feed on Saturday a video from 1989.

I watched it. For what must be the hundredth time. And, as always, burst into tears.

So much about this video is beautiful, and terrible, and inspiring, and heartbreaking, all at once.

But as I said, even more than the slight frame of the man making this astonishingly quiet, superlatively brave stance, even more than the simplicity of his dress – dark trousers, white shirt – what hits me are the bags. It’s hard to make out, but it looks like a briefcase in one hand and a shopping bag in the other.

Not only unarmed. But encumbered. Standing in front of a column of tanks. Because he feels he has to.

Just watching it again as I write this, the tears are flowing once more.

I knew next to nothing about China in 1989. I was 18. Doing my A-levels, hoping to get the results that would allow me to study Japanese at Cambridge. But even in my ignorance, everything that happened in China during May of that year filled me with a sense of possibility. That things could change. That people who hoped for the better – not just for themselves, but their fellows – could prevail.

And then came 4 June. Or May 35th, or any of the other date references now routinely blocked by the Great Firewall of China. As the tanks and troops rolled into Tiananmen Square. The protests were routed. Hundreds were killed. Something intangible died too. And in my teenage naïveté, I couldn’t stop weeping.

Then, the next day, came this guy. I don’t know what happened to him. I hope – somehow – he avoided the fate one fears was probably his. (Let’s face it. The traditional telling of the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes finishes before the likely dénouement, where the little boy who yells out “I can see your bum in that!” is dragged off by soldiers who quietly explain to his parents that they never, actually, had a son in the first place, and any memory they may have to the contrary must be a fairy-tale.)

But when I cry at this video, it’s not just for the hopelessness. It’s for the opposite too. It’s at the thought that even in the darkest moments, when raw power smiles and shows its teeth, human beings exist who will say: No. Not this. Not now. Not me.

There’s hope in those tears. There’s faith – not just religious faith, but a faith that we frail, petty beings, with all our doubts and despondencies, our unerring ability to get the wrong end of the stick and listen to the demons whispering in our ear, can always find a way to step up. For as long as that’s true, there’s hope.

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