A Mason's Work

[00:00] imagine, imagine you only went to the gym when you felt like you needed to be strong,
[00:07] not like on a schedule, not as a regular thing, not as a practice or any of that kind of stuff,
[00:15] but only when you felt weak or outmatched, uh, or unable to do a thing you needed to do.
[00:22] How do you think that would work? Right? Like I need to lift this car up off of somebody who's
[00:27] injured. Now I'm going to try and be strong. How do you think that's going to work long-term?
[00:33] Right? You'll find, I think, just like everybody that the moment you need capacity, the moment you
[00:40] need a capability is probably the wrong time to try and build it. The crisis does not wait for you to
[00:50] get ready. The crisis is here and it assumes that you have the capacity to respond.
[00:58] When we talk about our work internally, our, uh, capacity to solve problems and deal with the
[01:07] stresses of everyday life, it becomes very obvious very quickly that you kind of wish you had started
[01:14] years ago. Right? And it's that old, uh, the old proverb, like when's the best time to plant a tree,
[01:20] uh, was 20 years ago. The second best time is, is now when we look at developing the ability to
[01:31] respond and interact and change the environment around us. Um, the, the thing you want to make space
[01:38] for is the practice in the moment in the mundane middle, if, if you will, not the extremes of your
[01:49] everyday life, not the really tough times and not the really joyful times. It's the regular day is when
[01:58] the practice and profession of Freemasonry starts to become an important and meaningful activity.
[02:06] We can all have, uh, really bad days and, uh, and those peak experiences as well. Those really great
[02:15] and amazing days. And, uh, as those happen, when they happen for the various reasons that they do,
[02:23] uh, it's important to know that very little that you're going to do in those moments is going to
[02:30] meaningfully change the outcome if you don't have the ability to respond. What does that mean? What does
[02:38] it look like? When we start becoming, uh, our true selves, the, the agentic capacity to respond to the
[02:49] environment around us with the, uh, skill and, uh, acumen to be able to solve problems and approach with a
[02:59] novel solutions and create space for emergent opportunities and all of the kinds of things that,
[03:06] that the sort of Renaissance person's able to do, uh, what will happen is those moments themselves will
[03:15] take on a completely different character. They won't feel overwhelming. They won't feel like it's out of
[03:22] control. It will feel like this is just another thing. And that is one of the reasons why we build
[03:29] this capacity, uh, so that all of that sort of training and activity that we're doing to understand
[03:35] our own responses, to figure out how to best solve those problems, to not get in our own way when it
[03:40] comes to how we do that. Um, that all enables us to essentially, um, treat more and more extremes in
[03:49] terms of behavior, in terms of the situation, in terms of the sort of experience or the social
[03:54] construct, those extremes become essentially, uh, more tolerable for lack of a better way to say it
[04:01] in the overall, in your all everyday life. Right? So as you do this, you can tolerate and endure and
[04:12] thrive in, uh, a broader range of everyday life. That is really the cultivation of resilience.
[04:22] And so if you know somebody that, uh, flies off the handle at every little thing, this is a person
[04:31] who has not cultivated enough resilience to deal with the challenges of everyday life. If you find that
[04:39] you're that person, you're really setting yourself up for an opportunity to do the work.
[04:48] Uh, and we'll talk about over the next couple of episodes, how identifying those places where the
[04:56] extremes pull you off of your center or pull you out of, uh, uh, your ability to respond meaningfully,
[05:05] remarkably, you know, capably that kind of thing. Uh, that, that pull off of center is the beginning
[05:12] of finding something really important. And we'll talk about that in the next episode. See you then.