If you happen to stop by the firm around 10:30am on a random day you might come into the office to encounter a church like hush. My preference is quiet. My team reflects that sensibility, and all my team prefer a quiet workplace. Clients have at times slipped in waiting patiently for us to come up front while we are finishing a project or tapping that last key for an important email. The visitor can’t help to comment on “how quiet it is.” Those quiet moments where work is being accomplished are treats for me. I imagine all of us pushing the production of a file to the next step like noiseless manufacturers of old.
On Tuesday of this week, I paused to listen to the hum of each team member working away at their desk. The quiet almost reverent solitude is my happiest time at the firm. When I dreamed of my practice in law school, I always thought that the work would be important and the client’s personal connection even more important. A smooth frictionless machine. My familiarity with deep work is associated with quiet concentration. The avoidance of noise is obviously a spectrum indicator and manifests itself by avoiding crowds, at capacity places and loud venues. If I was normal, I could enjoy a good get together or a festive gathering. If I was well adjusted, I might have been able to process the loud noises of hunting, but the anticipation of a loud gun shot in a tranquil place is too much. If I was better suited, I would not feel claustrophobic or go into an OCD fit constantly checking for unobstructed exits. If I were balanced, my trips to the dentist would not require me to wear headphones and clear the remainder of my day to de-cortisol. I could get through a cleaning without my heart pounding and my clothes drenched with panic sweat. I am not normal and these activities are painful for me.
As a kid, these peccadilloes were met with unwavering demands for me to suck it up and get over it. As an adult, I can manage these “normal” stresses with my own “eccentric” strategies. Charming instead of weird. The simple diction adjustment from weird to eccentric might be the greatest advantage of getting educated. Maybe that was my goal when I wanted my own practice. The management of life events in my own way or the control of my environment to maximize my coping mechanisms as elevated instead of juvenile. Youth is drudgery but then one day you realize that you are able to engage the world on your own terms. To outsiders, the incessant phone calls and the copious amounts of files might seem overwhelming. But that chaos is just the raw materials getting organized for production. What might look like a pile of confusion is really just the building blocks of client goals. The remnants of a life event gone wrong that require legal work to put the pieces of a once confident strategy back together again. We get to produce them and act as change agents. These heterogenous products get scattered by life or even shattered by other people leaving the client looking at these seemingly disconnected “things” without a clue of what to do first.
The effort now set before us, absent the noise and clattering of syncopated attempts, makes choosing what to do first similar to the conductor’s hands raised waiting to set off the first note in a well orchestrated symphony. That first note sets the stage for cacophony or opus. Eliminating distraction, off-key notes and miss-timed percussion are critical disciplines to an effective performance. Fortunately, these events get to be played out with a new set of parameters I control far from the madding crowds. As a youth my “strategies” are the ill-conceived efforts of a weird kid but as a trusted professional, the deployment of organized reconciliations free from the imposition of restrictive noises are the undertakings of an educated eccentric. All of this I prefer to do quietly and with the hushed reverence usually reserved for a grand cathedral.
Albert R. Hartley