A Mason's Work

I was facilitating a discussion at the lodge, a couple years ago now, and we started talking about the idea of charity. The concept that charity is, it's a lot of different things. It's not simply speaking, for example, like donating money to a cause or, you know, giving donating blood or anything like that, working in a soup kitchen. There is tons of different definitions of charity. And one of the more important things to consider when it comes to charity as a concept, is not necessarily how that charity is expressed.

And what I mean by that is, focusing too much on the financial contributions or on the time contributions will lead you down a path where that behavior itself isn't necessarily productive. You can, go pathological with all sorts of behaviors, and charity is one of them, believe it or not. So, more importantly, as you explore the concept of charity, I think it's important to understand that that is a mental construct as well. That charity, applies to, your emotional conditions, your mental conditions, being charitable towards, the people around you in terms of perhaps being more patient, being more kind, being charitable with yourself, and understanding that, you know, you're still figuring it out too. And that's okay.

As you work through the concept of charity and really start to internalize what that means, I think you'll find that there is a lot of great, working material there. So think about charity. Think about how you're using it as either maybe a attention getting technique on the behavior side or as that you're you're perhaps harder on yourself than maybe you should be, charity kind of plays in all of those domains. So think about it as you go about your week.