Sheridan: Con-Law

THINKING: YOUR CHOICES

God gave you a brain.

You're supposed to use it.

He gave you emotions too.  We use those all the time, sometimes without thinking.  We're on automatic when it comes to emotion.

Thinking, however, requires thought.

That's work.

First we have to learn.

Then we have to apply.

And the two don't often mesh, learning and application.  Because in between the two, we have to think.

Not everyone likes to think everything through each time.

Some of us join churches.  Or political parties.  Or let our nation do the thinking for us.

But those who have been obliged to exercise the thinking muscle feel a need to think for ourselves, however imperfectly.

We don't want to give up our brain faculty either to rabble rousers or earnest presidents.

So we think for ourselves.

No two people think alike.

Maybe that's why they call us "individuals."

A mind of his own.

That's what we have.

Use it or lose it.

This makes it difficult to join a political party, or worse, follow it.

LAWYER-THINK

Lawyers think differently.

You don't go to law school to learn to think.

You already know how to think, otherwise you wouldn't have gotten into law school.

In law school, you learn additional ways of looking at things, which to me is a new way of thinking.

Artists and comics have their ways of thinking

So do scientists and medical people.

It can be habit forming, and once a new way of looking at things, and thinking about them sets in,  you're not quite the same person that you once were, because now you see the world through a different lens.

I remember the first new way of looking at things that I came across after entering law school.  There was this new issue of the law review and I'd never seen a law review before.  This is a magazine of sorts put out by the leading students and it's considered quite an honor to be chosen to be on the law review.  I was never on the law review.

The first article in the first law review that I ever looked at was about the subject of drugs.  It wasn't so much about illegal narcotics as it was about drugs regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The article started out by telling you what a drug was.

Well, I already knew what a drug was.  Drugs were pills in the medicine chest that you took when you were sick.

Drugs are anything that you ingest by which you intend to alter the functioning of your mind and/or body, the article began.  Those aren't the exact words, because who can remember that far back, but the words "drugs are," "intend" and the idea of changing the way you are or feel are the elements of the first paragraph of this article that I was looking at which I still remember to this day.

This is why coffee, tea, alcohol and tobacco are drugs, because you take them to make yourself feel better, or more awake, or stimulated, or relaxed, etc.  They don't come in pill-bottles taken from the medicine chest, but we use these substances as drugs.

That was an eye-opener for me.  Drugs didn't have to come in pill bottles, they could come in other forms.  The form made no difference.  What made a substance a drug was an idea that went on in my mind, called my intent.  If I had a cup of coffee to wake me up in the morning, that was a drug.  If I had a drink to relax and be sociable, that was a drug.

Once I realized that a drug was a substance taken to make me feel better, I had a different way of looking at the world.

Maybe you came across an idea in law school that affected your way of looking at the world.  I'd be interested to know about it.