Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [28]
Until the week of Order, I took it as a compliment when I was described as disorganized. But as I stared down at my little chart for the week and thought of the struggle ahead, I was reminded that chaos was not on the list of virtues. Even Ben felt inadequate when it came to Order. He wrote:
My scheme of ORDER gave me the most trouble; . . .
In truth, I found myself incorrigible with respect to Order; and now I am grown old, and my memory bad, I feel very sensibly the want of it. But, on the whole, tho’ I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavour, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it; as those who aim at perfect writing by imitating the engraved copies, tho’ they never reach the wish’d-for excellence of those copies, their hand is mended by the endeavor, and is tolerable while it continues fair and legible.
My heart sank when I read this. If Benjamin Franklin was undone by Order, what was to become of me?
Now, if you knew Chris Levan, my contemporary adviser, you would have undoubtedly told me to take a pass on his advice for this week. If I am a student of impetuousness, he is the master. He has a bit of the whirling dervish about him: a thousand projects going at one time, each in some state of chaos but all coming off in the end despite his lack of organizational skills.
The first time I met Chris, I got some sense of his nature. I was invited to a meeting of a committee at the church I attended. It was my favorite type of committee. We met irregularly, had very little responsibility, and got fed snacks. The purpose of this meeting was to introduce ourselves to the new minister at the church. I anticipated nothing to come of it except for some reasonably good snacking. I was wrong.
Within a few moments, Chris, the new minister, had us all agreeing to take on three new tasks (none of which had the potential for snacking), and he himself had committed to at least five significant endeavors. When he opened his schedule to set up our next meeting, I saw that there wasn’t a free hour for the next two months. Indeed, the inside of his day planner looked like it was completed by someone in the throes of a manic episode, with notes and scribbles everywhere. The leftover eraser shreds from numerous deletions and corrections still clung to its pages. It was all more than a little overwhelming.
The thing is that I can’t remember what happened to any of those projects and tasks. Maybe they got done, maybe they didn’t. What I do remember was that whatever Chris did accomplish, he did through energy and force of will, not organization.
Despite Chris not being an Order guru, he did give me some hope when we discussed this virtue. He told me that Franklin, like John and Charles Wesley of Methodist fame, was living in a social context where abuses of all kinds had shred the fabric of society. Corruption and mismanagement had dealt out destitution and starvation to the masses. Order and control were the only solutions to a decaying political system. So here was a virtue tied up in the very roots of the revolution that was to come. This virtue was very much a product of the circumstances of Franklin’s world.
If I was to understand and abide by the virtue of Order, Chris went on to explain, then I needed to seek the right Order for my world, not Franklin’s.
Well, that made sense! Though Ben’s scheme of virtue was conceived in the early part of the eighteenth century, Ben’s musings were cast among the chaos of an imperial power unresponsive to its colonies’ and colonists’ legitimate concerns and, eventually, a revolution.