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Okay, so maybe I needed to give more thought to the why questions. But for the moment Franklin called. For the moment, the why would have to be simply that I already had one-third of a social experiment finished. The book I had agreed to author on the subject wasn’t going to write itself.

Unfortunately, like most of our driven, ambitious, overly committed society, all I had to offer was chaos. Ben, however, wanted Order, so Order it would be.

How was I to create a system to wring Order from my chaos? There is an old saying, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” I like that sentiment, but I think that it misses an essential characteristic of humanity, part of the reason for our creation. So I would add after those wise words, “If you want to make him cry, tell him you have none.” So then as not to make God cry or Ben cringe, here were my plans.

We all (I assume) have dreams, desires, and goals. Remember when you were a kid and adults would ask you what you wanted to be when you grew up? Those early answers were great and dramatic and exciting: astronaut, ballerina, cowboy. No one ever wanted to be an accountant or a mortician. If you are like me, however, the answers, over time, became less grandiose and more realistic (although I looked back at old school materials and found “lawyer” listed as an alternative to astronaut . . . must have been a slow year). Whatever the answer, though, very few of us would have been able to describe a plan to achieve that goal. Yet of all the things in our life, the big goals are the most likely to require some organization and order to come to fruition. No one (other than Homer Simpson and Bugs Bunny) becomes an astronaut by mistake. No one climbs Mount Everest because he or she is staying at a Nepalese Holiday Inn and has a few hours to kill before checkout time.

So for the purpose of my scheme of Order, I decided that the big things should be called Visions. These are the world-changing, earthshaking, fall-to-your-knees types of dreams. As I said, Visions need plans to become reality. So I called the next part of the program Plans. I am nothing if not literal.

Plans are the more concrete version of Visions. If your Vision is to become an astronaut, then the Plan is the answer to the question, “Well, little Cameron, how will you become an astronaut?”

But even Plans need some deconstruction. If your answer to the question above was, “Well, I’m going to become a pilot and go to NASA to become an astronaut,” then your Plan to achieve your Vision still needs some specific tasks. Keeping with my literal theme, I called these Tasks. Tasks are those things that are immediate, small things that can be done quickly. These can be part of a larger Plan broken down, or they can simply be part of the detritus of day-today living.

So there. If you have a Vision, break it down into Plans, which you then break down into Tasks. Do these, and the next thing you know you’re staring out of the front windshield of the space shuttle. I had a plan of Order.

I tried it on Day 4. It worked—sort of. The problem with the scheme was that it seemed too easily defeated by the plans of others. I had my breakdown, all written out into Visions/Plans/Tasks, but just as I would get started on one of my Tasks, someone else would ask me to do something for him or her. The needs of others were getting in the way of my wants.

Didn’t they know I was trying to be morally perfect? Didn’t they understand that I had a scheme of Order to follow?

Of course, that’s what life is like, isn’t it? Often the plans of others get in the way of our own.

Maybe that was why Ben wanted to achieve the virtue of Order.

Maybe that’s why he had to admit that he never did.

A Detour on the Road to Perfection

Ben is a tease.

With my scheme of Order, he had given me just a small taste of what success might await if I follow him, a tempting morsel designed to allure and lure. Then came a significant bump in the road.

My initial success with Order ran headlong into my moral