A Mason's Work

So I don't know that it's fair to say that Masons have maybe more historians per population

than other organizations, but there is a strong allure to historical study amongst

three Masons.

And one of the perils that that creates for members of the craft who are trying to do

real sort of intra-personal development work is that we oftentimes confuse the aggrandizing

of history with the actual work of the craft.

To be clear, the stance of this podcast and all of my work is that the work of the craft

is active and it is immediate.

It is not strictly speaking.

This historical study of all the other Masons of the world or even the origin story of

remasonry.

That is, proximate work.

It's related to what we do, but it is not central to our craft.

Our central craft of making good men better requires the men to do the work on themselves.

And so it might be helpful to consider perhaps the historical context in which people are

arrived.

So where they came up, where they came through, they lived in.

So you look at people in the United States, famous remasons, or you look across the

seas and you see famous remasons.

And one of the things that you'll see very quickly is more often than not, these were men

with a good moral compass, trying their best to figure it out in the times that they

were in.

One of the things that we tend to do when we look back in time is we tend to project

a plan onto the activities that they undertook.

The reality of their life is the same as your own.

You are responding to situations in the moment.

You may have some level of plan that you're executing, but the ultimate story that your

life will tell will be written after you die.

You can write some of it while you're alive, but what's going to happen is historically

someone's going to tell someone else the story of your life and put pieces together that

may or may not have been connected.

And that's irrelevant obviously since you won't be around anymore.

But when you start to look at what we do with the other members of the craft is we tend

to then deify them to a degree and make them out to be more than what they are.

These were good men trying to figure it out.

There are brothers, they do good work or did good work.

It is now our turn to do the same.

So what happens oftentimes when we start this sort of deification process of the sort

of ancients as it were.

We tend to then compare ourselves unfavorably to the historical sort of powerhouses in the

field.

They were all outliers, cut print period, right?

Everyone that you've heard about is an outlier in the craft.

So if there is 100 Mason's in a room, one of them was George Washington or if there

were 10,000 Mason's in a room, one of them was George Washington.

So when you do this comparison model, you run into the problem of you're comparing your

sort of performance as a individual to these high water marks of the craft, which is a problem

because again, you're going to use that to beat yourself up or hold yourself back or turn

yourself down when in fact you may have just as much if not more power than they did.

If you would stop chasing the ghosts of the past and start chasing your own sort of power.

When we look to these things, that imposter syndrome that starts to come out when you start

doing stuff in the craft is real.

And it has real long term negative benefits to your mental health and emotional health.

So as you're sort of looking through the gilded halls of Freemasons past, don't forget

to put yourself amongst them in the way that your ambition will control your outcome here.

It is not your skill.

It is not your ability.

Those will all emerge to the challenge you have yet to face.

So don't let these sort of skeletons of our past, these gilded skeletons of the Masonic

history dictate how you interact and how you develop yourself to become a better man.

It's really easy to look at the entirety of the human history and just suggest that in some way,

you're not a part of that.

And in fact, you are.

You are just as much a part of the human story as anyone else,

whether or not you're famous or powerful or whatever the context might be for that evaluation,

that does not make you an equal part of the story.

So claim your space and inhabit it and build the life you want.

Build the Masonic experience you want.

Build the environment that you're looking to create to then platform you for growth.

Don't let somebody else tell you what Freemasonry was and should always be.

George Washington never had to deal with doom scrolling on his cell phone.

So you are winning battles already that our ancient brethren and Freemasonry could never imagine.