Rewriting history

Inspiration is hard to come by...especially in Law school...The whole process itself isn't necessarily designed to deaden you, but it nonetheless does that. When you do things that are boring, you become boring. There isn't any way to make most law school classes exciting unless you really care about what is happening. Most of the people who are excited aren't excited about the subject, they are excited about FIGHTING about the subject. They simply want someone to argue with, beat up, browbeat, put down, humiliate, and in general serve to prop up their flaggin ego. They are rewriting history.

Rewriting history is a subject I came across while reading a website by a guy named Animal MacYoung. He wrote a book called something like "cheap shots.. and other dirty tricks". A self-proclaimed self-defense expert, his aspect of self-defense comes from the street. He is, for lack of a better, word, a thug. Nonetheless he is an intelligent thug, one who is worth listening to, as he offers sage advice on self-defense from an important perspective.

IN any case, one of the traps people fall into when studying the martial arts, and in other fields, is rewriting history. They are making up for things that happened in the past that they were hurt by. It rang true for me. All that time I spent in the dojo, honing punches and kicks and various chokeholds and joint locks were an attempt to rewrite history, in a very real way.

Except that I never really cared enough to put myself in a position to have to use it. I always saw self-defense as just that; keeping yourself safe. Thus I mastered conflict avoidance. If someone was driving like an asshole, I usually took a different route. If someone was getting loud and aggressive, I go somewhere else. Whether it was because I was afraid or just trying to avoid stress, I don't care to explore. It doesn't really matter.

It's a funny thing to realize that after ten years of throwing punches, you begin to realize, as my friend once said, how much ten years of learning to communicate may have helped you out.

Now what exactly does this have to do with law school?

Law school is a fight. Court battles are fights. IN fact, the word "trial" originally meant armed combat between two parties in order to solve a dispute. You can see this in the adversarial process of the law. There is a winner and a loser quite often. There is a judge and a jury. There is your hired gun, the attorney, and the opposing black knight, the other counsel.

And of course there are different personalities that come into the fray. Some people are simply too gentle to be attorneys. Others are so harsh and angry that they may be effective, but end up hated. Others cruise along with a zenlike ease, taking nothing personally and doing what they need to do to survive. That is the path I would take.