Cone of Silence

A lot of what I do must be kept confidential.  Various rules of ethics require me to keep what I hear or read to myself.  Sometimes I even have to keep what I say confidential.  Some of it is funny; other stuff is just heartbreaking and shocking.  That's the stuff I not only don't want to tell anyone, I even wish I could forget it myself.

It can be a little hard and even lonely carrying around all of these confidences.  Luckily, the sheer volume alone demands that some of get dumped out of my brain in order to hold the new stuff I have to keep up with.  The mental capacity only has a certain amount -- the rest has to go somewhere ...

Sometimes I wonder about others who have similar obligations to maintain confidences, such as priests and  ministers that hear confessions, or psychiatrists and mental health professionals that counsel patients.

With several of my clients and other attorneys we invoke the Cone of Silence whenever we are discussing a subject that we know falls within that category of "privileged."  It's a humorous image from the Get Smart movie (or old TV show) the visually depicts the protection of the conversation.

I was getting ready to write this post when the newest spinoff of the Law & Order franchise was coming on, Law & Order L.A.  Funny, but I think I saw that tonight's episode was entitled "Cone of Silence,"  but it went by too fast.

Today I am grateful to know that I can choose to be happy -- and that I made that choice.  What does that have to do with Cone of Silence?  It's not a direct correlation -- but even with what I know about human nature, and the actions of human beings, after all that has happened within the Cone of Silence, I still choose to be happy.