A Mason's Work

[00:00] So if every good plan requires the seed of recovery for when it goes sideways, what does that actually look like?
[00:10] Well, let's talk about the consequences of not having this first and foremost.
[00:14] By not having a remount plan when you fall off the horse, you essentially create this promise to your future self that you fail.
[00:25] So you say, I'm going to do this thing or I'm going to perform this activity or I'm going to go do X, Y, and Z.
[00:32] And then because you didn't plan in that flexibility when you don't inevitably for whatever reason.
[00:39] And again, this is a moral judgment or this isn't even criticism.
[00:42] It's a, you know, the, the contact, uh, you know, the plans that you create meeting contact with the world inevitably means that some of your preconditions are just not going to exist for you to do what you need to do.
[00:56] But every promise you break internally, it has a different effect, different outcome.
[01:02] This isn't like, oh yeah, I just missed a to do.
[01:05] It creates this sort of moral drag over time.
[01:09] You begin to create this very sort of cumulative, uh, sense internally that you are a failure or that you are incapable of success.
[01:20] Let's put it that way.
[01:21] And that, that sensation then turns into a behavioral set.
[01:25] It's just not really possible to sustain.
[01:28] Uh, you begin to, you know, uh, ratchet back on all of your commitments socially and you say, well, I'm, you know, I can't honor the commitments I make to myself.
[01:36] I certainly am not going to honor the ones I make to my friends.
[01:39] It leads to this really profound isolation and, uh, simultaneously a sense of sort of unworthiness and competence.
[01:47] And we're trying to avoid going down that path.
[01:50] And again, it starts with planning.
[01:53] I know it's crazy.
[01:54] Um, so when you start building a remounting plan, let's talk about what it is and what it isn't.
[02:00] Right.
[02:01] So it's not a lower standard.
[02:03] It's not sort of permission to just screw up.
[02:08] Like that's not the intent here.
[02:10] It's not pessimism dressed up as wisdom.
[02:13] What this really is, is it's the work of the worshipful master, that ability to create space applied to time itself.
[02:21] Now the worshipful master doesn't just like point and shoot and give orders and tell, you know, hope the lodge kind of figures it out.
[02:28] It's creating space and conditions under which the work can actually proceed.
[02:33] Preparation, through structure, through honest assessment of what the, what sort of your life requires or the craft requires and what the craftsman can deliver.
[02:40] However, if you're the worshipful master in your own life, that means you need to evaluate the conditions that you build for your future self as part of that work.
[02:51] In most lodges, the floor of the lodge is not just sort of random.
[02:55] It's a pavement.
[02:56] It's a black and white square of light and dark.
[02:59] It's an honest map of what life is like.
[03:02] It has ups and downs.
[03:04] It's not a failure of design.
[03:06] It's not something to be corrected.
[03:08] It's an acknowledgement built into the architecture of the work itself that progress kind of has this up and down nature to it.
[03:18] When we plan, we can't plan for only the white squares.
[03:24] You can't plan for only the good days.
[03:27] You have to plan for the whole thing.
[03:29] And so how do we do this in a meaningful way?
[03:34] And I'm going to, you know, confuse things just a little bit more by bringing one more tool into the mix.
[03:39] And it's the trowel.
[03:42] When we use the trowel, we're filling the space between things, right?
[03:47] When a Mason does this with a operative Mason does this with a brick wall, it's filling the joints.
[03:52] It's, it's building the structure and bringing it together.
[03:54] It's not waiting for the failure to occur and then patching with the trowel.
[04:01] You build with it.
[04:03] You build with, in Masonic language, that care and compassion.
[04:08] You plan with it.
[04:10] You design with it.
[04:11] You take care of your future self in the requirements you're setting up, in the conditions you're setting up, in the environment you're setting up.
[04:21] How can I plan with care for me and by proxy for the, with the people around me so that when reality hits, I'm not essentially adding one more checkbox to the list of failure.
[04:35] What does this look like in practice?
[04:39] Looks like a couple of things.
[04:41] First things first, this is why we have things like the cable tow.
[04:45] Can you commit to whatever it is you're trying to plan?
[04:49] Do you have the capacity?
[04:51] Do you have the time?
[04:53] Do you have the energy?
[04:54] Do you have the emotional capital?
[04:57] Do you have the physical capital?
[04:59] If you, if there's expense required, do you have the things required for your plan?
[05:04] Okay.
[05:06] That's kind of step one.
[05:07] If you don't have that stuff, then you have to move your plan backwards.
[05:11] How can I acquire those things?
[05:13] How can I get the emotional sort of clarity that I'm going to need in order to approach this problem?
[05:18] When we start talking about this, that sort of first look at what that is, uh, the conditions, the environmental conditions is, is really important.
[05:29] The second one is something they do in, uh, corporate America.
[05:33] Uh, it's called a pre-mortem.
[05:36] So assuming a project is going to fail or a commitment's going to not work out, uh, or knowing that something could go wrong, you anticipate in advance what those things are.
[05:47] What could go wrong before the patient died?
[05:51] So we can avoid the patient dying, uh, or the project failing or what have you.
[05:57] Same thing's true when you're creating plans for your future self.
[06:01] Man, I know that if I drive by, you know, the, the ice cream shop on the way home, I'm really going to be tempted to step to stop there and grab some ice cream.
[06:12] Maybe, maybe, maybe before I plan how I'm going to structure my diet, I reroute my commute from work.
[06:22] Right.
[06:22] It sounds crazy.
[06:24] These sounds like easy, you know, uh, the relatively easy lifts, but they're not the kinds we think about because we're not applying the trial to the future.
[06:32] We're not applying it to our future self.
[06:35] And so we'll talk a little bit more about what the recovery plans look like and how do we get back on and, and all that kind of stuff over the next couple of episodes.
[06:43] Uh, stay tuned.
[06:44] And if you have questions or comments on this, please don't hesitate to reach out and add a comment into the, uh, the podcast, wherever you're listening to your podcasts.
[06:52] And, uh, we'll see if we can get back to those and bring them up in future episodes.