A Mason's Work

The common gavel reminds us to divest our
hearts and consciousness of all the vices
and superfoodies of life

Now I want to break that down because for
some of you this language is crazy and if
you've not sort of grown up as somebody
who's studied the language or read a lot

You might be wondering what all that is
about so let's start with the the easy stuff
so what's advice is anything that you're
going to do that

Is like a guilty pleasure for some folks
they have a vice maybe it's gambling or
maybe it's chewing your fingernails

Or maybe it is pornography or things like
that those vices are

In many ways you can compare them to the
idea of self-medicating so they are the
things that you do to bring yourself a
little bit of pleasure even though you know
that it's some level it's probably not great
for you so for some folks that you know for
example run to alcohol or run to you know
sweets or whatever the guilty pleasures in
life are those all sort of count as vices
and there are whole businesses devoted to
this so you'll notice for example the bar
business the pornography business all of
these kind of major domains of The Human
Experience the gambling businesses when we
talk about divesting ourselves of those
vices it's not the suggest that you can't
enjoy any of those things

It has to do in context with the the mode in
which you use those vices

If you are using them to escape your
day-to-day reality that's pretty much no
bueno if you are using them as a way to
facilitate relaxation as part of a
nourishment or a recovery process that might
be okay so long as you're being honest with
yourself about your consumption

All right which is really really hard to do
there's a sort of an Angel quote out there
somewhere that you know the the best people
in the world don't lie to themselves and
they are also recognize that the easiest
people to lie to

The the superfluities side of life side of
the sort of gavel is about getting rid of
the things that don't matter Superfluous is
the root word there and when something is
Superfluous it is unnecessary and so that
might be your concern about the trivialities
of life for example if you are not regularly
impacted on a daily basis by the color of
the flowers in your garden why are you going
to worry too much that they're not the right
shade this kind of a superfluity superfluity

Her fluidity gets to

Really like that the old Kenny Rogers song
about knowing when to hold him and when to
fold him it's trying to make sure that you
don't give the

Too much effort to the wrong things to the
wrong part of the conversation to know when
something is important and when it's not
know when you have something and when you
don't

So to rid yourself of these things is is
very very difficult sometimes because not
everything you know comes with an inherent

Sort of name tag on it that says that this
is really important it all feels important
or it tends to and if it all feels important
how do you know what to get let go of and
this is where the tools come in to help the
other tools you can use in the Masonic
language to help you figure out what's
important and what's not so what's
Superfluous and you can divest yourself of
it or eliminate

And what's what's really important the level
is a great tool for this will I care about
this in 100 years will I care about this
another days will I care about this in a
hundred minutes use the the level of time to
help you figure out is the thing that you're
stressing out over or worrying about worth
worrying about in the grand scheme of things
is it important to somebody else and this
this is another great sort of test

With this tool

And it's it's a great sort of argument
management principle if you're arguing with
your spouse one of the things you can do
very quickly in that conversation is
determined if it's on a scale of 1 to 10 a
10 for her

Or him and a one for you arguments over

Captain period you don't care it's a
superfluity for you or a Superfluous for you
so let it go divest yourself of the need to
be right there or the need to win it doesn't
matter so the the sort of core understanding
of the common gavel here is get rid of
things don't matter and stop doing the
things that are distracting you from the
things that matter so use your gavel
accordingly we'll get more into some of the
basics of these tools as we go some of the
language deconstruction but for now that's
your common