I turned 46 a few months ago. It’s hard to believe that 46 years have passed by. Where did all the time go?
Just yesterday I was five years old riding alongside my dad in our farm jeep on the country roads of Harrodsburg, Kentucky. The jeep’s top was off, unbridled. Just like us.
The air smelled soft and sweet, like sugar and salt mixed together, true freedom. A bright blue sky protected me, and I connected with the road we were travelling. Really connected.
I rode silently, listening to dad’s non-verbals. It was a joyous, happiness-filled time. It was empty space abundant with life, nature, and a-now-rare certainty that I was never alone.
This memory glimmers in my mind’s eye, it being one of a few, rare prisms that comes and goes as life takes its daily toll on me now. Back lit with an element of transcendence.
I see myself enjoying the ride, the scent of freshly cut grass, and dad’s understated but ever-present warmth while my mind moved in silent, deep thought.
Five years old… I was so young then.
I literally remember thinking, “I’m five years old” while riding that day. That mental imprint now-tattooed upon me as my five-year-old mind explored a strange island of thought about “legality and morality.”
Why in the world a five year would be thinking about legality and morality, I do not know. But it is true, I did, and now I see it as strange (which it was) given my age and traditional upbringing. Specifically, how “legality should come before morality,” meaning that we should treat people the same with uniform legal rules, irrespective of creed or status or hurtful judgments about unpopular paradigms of living life that don’t hurt others.
It could be that dad’s job of dealing with the down and trodden, people accused of crimes and other misdeeds, sparked this internal conversation. -I seeing his comings and goings in his work, hence my interest in it… It could also be that I was just strange, which is probably the case. I’ve always been different, and I always will. I have always had, and always will have, an internal oddity that pervades me, a deep-but-light complex veil over my head, though I accept it and now love it.
Looking back, I now know that my young mission was an archetypal preface of sorts to come… Much bullshit to come in the “legal world” dealing with legality, morality, and all the in-between. A mission at such a young age naturally prefaced a life challenge with it.
As a lawyer having practiced over twenty years, and having gone through much legal wrangling and crap associated with it, I look back to that jeep ride with a hopeful heart. I am hopeful because I see possibility in all of us, including myself. For I now know that my sweet 5-year-old self was wrong. -She thinking about “legality before morality” while riding in that farm jeep that day. Of course, that five-year-old, blue-eyed girl was kind and well-intended… But wrong. She now being forty-six and now knowing the truth of the contemplation of her then-5-year-old mind.
Legality does not come before morality. It is not true. Legality must be morality and morality must be legality, such that laws we make and enforce are directly parallel to our collective consciousness. Legality neither comes before morality nor behind it, for each and both are key, essential ingredients to equality, fairness, and justice in a free society. We cannot separate legal and moral. And we cannot live separate lives, legal and moral. We must be one, united.
Compassion will get us there, to the merger of the fields. There is no real competition between them; it is illusory. For neither can ever win alone. With compassion, “lack of judgment,” we can build the society that we need and desire for equality so that all may be free to pursue their own happiness while preserving others’ states of happiness and freedom. Compassion is the key.
