A Huge Lesson I Learned at an Airport
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
Ok, so I know I’ve blogged about kindness before. But an experience a couple of weeks ago prompted me to revisit the subject.
I'd taken on a case late in the day; the final hearing was in just a few weeks. My clients hadn't filed their Response in time and had applied to submit it after the deadline. At the time of the original deadline, they'd been busy trying to save their business which had been hit hard by Covid. This was followed by their father becoming ill and dying.
I’d been struck upon first contact with the solicitor that he was taking an unusually hard line. Upon sending an initial email to introduce myself, within 5 minutes, I’d received an angry tirade in which he complained at length about my clients' many failures to comply with deadlines. He’d then proceeded to send such emails on a regular basis. Sigh.
However, the solicitor’s conduct crossed the line from grumpy to downright unpleasant when, during the preliminary hearing, he made a number of callous comments to the tribunal about my clients' situation.
I was appalled. Sure, do your job but be human about it. We're all doing our best. You can be a litigator and still be kind. You never know what people are going through.
I was taught the importance of kindness many years ago on a trip to Barcelona. My husband and I were queuing up to go through security. We were stood directly behind a family of four: mum, dad and two teenage kids. The dad seemed extremely stressed. He was checking that they had their papers and that his two sons were ready to go through the body scanner. He triple checked everything in a highly agitated manner. I remember internally rolling my eyes and thinking that he needed to chill out: we were only going through security! Get a grip, man!
However, when one of the man's sons went through the scanner, he started bucking and shrieking. He was over 6 feet tall and it was alarming to watch. His dad did his best to restrain him and calm him down so they could get through.
And then it hit me: the man's son was autistic. The dad had done this before and knew what was coming; that’s why he’d been so stressed.
Tears rolled down my face as I realised how ignorant I'd been. I’d judged the man for being agitated when he knew what was coming and I didn’t. It really taught me a lesson about being kind: you quite simply don't know what others are going through and what makes them behave in a certain way. They'll be acting under forces you know nothing about.
Little did I know then that, one day, I would become that man in the airport!
Fast forward 12 years or so, to October last year. There I was with my husband, taking our 11 year old autistic son on a plane for the first time since he was a baby. I was hyper stressed, knowing as I did that the unusual circumstances, environment, number of people, lights, queues, etc. could cause a meltdown of epic proportions which the whole airport would know about. We’d witnessed too many such meltdowns to count; being out with an autistic child can sometimes be like walking about with a live grenade that can go off at any time. But, to the people queuing behind me, I would have seemed like a neurotic person who needed to “get a grip” and “chill out”. Ha! Plato knew better over 2000 years ago. The legal profession should remember this too.
~Rachel