A Mason's Work

So in a recent episode I was talking about being one of the 12 and one of the

challenges with that perspective is not everyone in your lodge, your local

lodge, the lodges you've been to understands that responsibility and what it

comes with it. There's a lot of folks that have different takes on what

free masonry is but for those of us that are approved, you know, looking for

that self-improvement sort of song got to practice with or group to practice

with, it's really important to have and find your tribe. Now that tribe of

folks might not be your local lodge, it might be the lodge that you were raised

in and that's okay. What you need to do first and foremost is find your tribe

wherever that is. So there's plenty of online spaces to do this. There are

plenty of locations that lend themselves to these kind of things. Look to your

appended bodies if your local lodge doesn't solve the problem. Look to any of the

sort of auxiliary organizations that free masonry stand to congregate in. Any one

of those might be a good solution to your local lodge environment not

facilitating your growth. That said your local lodge, even the parts of it that

you may not like, can be used as agents for self-development. You'll find that

things that you reject and other people tend to be the things that you've

rejecting yourself that you don't want to address. There's tons of sort of

psychological principles here but once you find a group, whatever that group might

be where you want to do the work, the other hard part then is how do you do the

work, right? And the thing I want to bring up to that end is you have a lot of

different options for how do you start self-development in an organization or a

group. There's probably two primary approaches that I would take. First and

foremost, volunteer to the group, a high-trust group, that you're working on

X, Y or Z. I'm working on becoming less judgmental or I want to lose weight or

I want to develop my guitar playing skill or X, Y or Z. Whatever that skill is

or whatever that goal is that you're trying to achieve, share that with the

group and then check in with each other on a regular basis. Another option

altogether is really productive and maybe catching blind spots and that is to

collaborate with other people on a project of some sort. Now this is a situation

where you're really going to want to set some stages, set some standards up front

on how you're going to do it but having a project or initiative that you want to

work on and collaborate with others on allows you to work side by side in

tandem looking at a project or looking at something else and what you'll find

in those situations is rather than looking sort of directly at each other while

you're trying to help each other grow, you are looking at how each other work,

how each person in the group works or how each person in the project works. In

those situations you really get a completely different take on the brother and

you can support them and their growth and development in that way. Hey listen,

I've noticed that every time I have a difference of opinion with you about how

this project moves forward, you have a tendency to go burn the midnight oil and

do a bunch of work that then makes it hard for me to actually have an opinion

because it's opposite the work you just completed. Like this is a great

example of how we might learn to work together and why you want to

undertake projects with your brothers in your lodge or your virtual lodge space.

When you do this, when you work side by side on something else, again you get

that different take from a self-developed perspective that you wouldn't get if

you were simply announcing your goals. It is through these collective

experiences. Now a lot of guys are going to take this the wrong way because

their favorite thing is not mentioned here but it's in the work on yourself or

the work with each other on projects that fraternity is really formed, that

the relationships meaningfully develop. You will find a lot of guys will pay

lip service to what the social aspect of the craft is and anyone who's done

work together will tell you that the best social aspects of the craft are

emergent through work. They evolve through working together. It is through those

hammering out disagreements. It's through those collective experiences where

someone overcomes an obstacle or creates a great success. This is where the

real fraternity is and everything else that's just sort of getting together for

cigars. I'm not saying it's not valuable but it's not where the highest value

stuff is. And so I encourage you to find your lodge even if that isn't your

lodge.