Last week, my husband and I had to cut down our favorite tree. The tree was a Chinese elm that shaded our backyard. It was at least 80 feet tall. When we first bought the house, the tree guy told us it was dying and recommended that we cut it down. But we loved it. Its branches were long and shapely; its leaves were a pretty pale spring-green. It contrasted nicely with the army-green, muscle-bound bur and live oaks in our neighborhood. So we held on to it a lot longer than we should have.
The drought of the last two summers was really hard on it. It had lost over 80% of its canopy. And so finally, last week, we decided it was time for it to go.
My husband thinks it was thirty years old. I don’t know why he picked that number. I like to imagine it was planted when the house was built in 1952. I don’t know why I picked that number. The tree guy said there was no way to tell for sure how old it was. I didn’t have time to debate this point with him, but I wanted to ask him: can’t you count the rings so we can know for sure?
David Cain, who blogs at raptitude.com, says: “Life is a subjective experience, and that cannot be escaped. Every experience I have comes through my own, personal, unsharable viewpoint. There can be no peer reviews of my direct experience, no real corroboration. This has some major implications for how I live my life. The most immediate one is that I realize I must trust my own personal experience, because nobody else has this angle, and I only have this angle. Another is that I feel more wonder for the world around me, knowing that any ‘objective’ understanding I claim to have of the world is built entirely from scratch, by me. What I do build depends on the books I’ve read, the people I’ve met, and the experiences I’ve had. It means I will never see the world quite like anyone else, which means I will never live in the quite the same world as anyone else—and therefore I mustn’t let outside observers be the authority on who I am or what life is really like for me. Subjectivity is primary experience—it is real life, and objectivity is something each of us builds on top of it in our minds, privately, in order to explain it all.”
This quote makes me wonder: do lawyers win cases because their client is right? Or do lawyers win cases because they are able to get a jury to see the case from their client’s point of view?
In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout says: “One time Atticus said you never really knew a man until you stood in his shoes and walked around in them. Just standin’ on the Radley porch was enough.”
This fall, take a minute to stand in your client’s shoes. See how it feels to walk around in them. And then invite your audience—your arbiter of objectivity—to do the same.