A Mason's Work

So this week we're going to be talking about the junior warden and it makes sense to start

with the junior warden in what the role of the junior warden is in a lodge.

The junior warden oversees the rest and refreshment period of a lodge meeting.

It is managing timing.

It manages going to be appetites of the lodge.

It speaks to all of the needs of the workmen relative to exertion and replenishment.

There is a continuity of effort that the junior warden should be observing and managing

the organization or the room or the lodge or your life.

Basically on vibes, right?

Are you burnt out?

Are you wrecked with the current situation you're in?

Do you have any resources left?

Emotional resilience, cognitive resilience, physical resilience?

Do you have enough left in the tank to continue work at peak performance?

If the answer is no, the junior warden is essentially the person who's going to evaluate and

in a lot of ways arbitrate that work, that situation.

In a formal lodge setting, the junior warden essentially observes the sun at Hymeridian

and determines if it's time for a break.

When the lodge is in the care of the junior warden, people can step out of line for work,

but we can't add new workmen.

This is an odd bit of understanding about the craft.

Inside the history of Freemasonry, there's probably more work to be done to understand

some of the reasoning behind that.

But if you abstract that out to a conventional job site, you're not going to switch workmen

halfway through the project if you can avoid it.

If you're comfortable with the folks that are doing the work, you're not going to allow

a shift change in the middle with entirely new laborers that don't know the nature of

the work trying to be conducted.

But beyond that sort of conjecture all aside, we can suggest that the junior warden is really

responsible for the vibe, the vibe check.

How does that happen?

What does it look like?

How do we do it?

What are the executions or the parameters for it?

In a lot of ways, when you step into that role, you are processing the past and the future.

You're processing the nature of the work done to date where people are in the moment and

how much capacity is left in the future.

If you look at this in the context of an obligation that you've made, for example, maybe you've committed

to a project in your life or your family and you're looking at the amount of sunlight

you have left in the day in order to complete this work because it's outside.

You're going to evaluate this and say, hey, listen, there's not enough sunlight left

in the day.

I have to plan for a stopping point for today's work so that I can proceed tomorrow without

essentially having to start from zero or without tripping over all the stuff that I may

have out in the yard or whatever it might be.

That junior warden function is that capacity to be simultaneously understanding of the

levels of performance in the moment.

What peak performance looks like relative to the organization or to yourself and then

from there being able to process that and determine whether or not the objectives can

be completed given the nature of where the work is at the moment.

So if, for example, you're not going to engage in a deep-launch discussion after an hour

of administrative arguing.

That's not going to work.

It's going to have negative outcomes.

Everyone's going to be depleted.

It's going to impede the progress of the work.

This is the junior warden.

And as we go over in the next couple of episodes, what that means at a behavioral level, a

relational level and a systemic level, you should get to see some of the gift that the junior

warden perspective brings to the table.

So as you're continuing to do your work, you'll understand a little bit more about when

to step in that position and how to use it most effectively to help you achieve your

objectives.