Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [36]
In fact, the deal having been completed, the beer started to flow even before the bus arrived. I joined my friends, and the other bus trippers, in toasting our voyage. We continued to toast as the bus left the university. The consumption continued following a trip to the duty-free shop at the border and kept right on after a stop at the world’s cheapest liquor store (or so it seemed to us) in tax-free New Hampshire. It flowed and flowed and flowed.
And then the bathroom on our bus broke.
Short of actual physical violence or serious illness, there can be little to compare in discomfort to a bus full of . . . well . . . full bladders, a driver on a schedule, and an interstate short on rest stops.
Things looked to be coming to a head (so to speak) when I decided that the driver must stop. Deputized by my fellow travelers, I spoke to our bus driver and asked politely if he could stop. “Nope. My instructions are to get to Florida as fast as I can. No stops until we get to the next rendezvous point.”
I explained our dire circumstances. No luck. I appealed to his conscience. He had none. I begged for a little understanding. He ignored me. It was only when I threatened—Mom, don’t read this—to use his head as a urinal that he came to a screeching halt at the next rest stop.
It was as if someone had opened the doors to a stockade. Drunken college students poured from the doors of the bus like runners before the bulls of Pamplona. I was struck, after my own relief was found, with the folly of three months of clear-headed resolution wasted in so stark and crass a fashion.
So I know the need for Resolution. And I know that even the mastery of it can be undone all too easily.
And never has there been a more timely resolution than Resolution. Like a white knight charging forth at the climactic moment in a battle, Franklin’s admonition to do what I ought came just at the moment in his course of virtues that I was failing (or at least faltering). Sure, I was still following the virtues, tracking my successes and failures, and generally heeding the words of Mr. Franklin, but my heart just wasn’t in it. My ethical mentor, Chris, had taken the week before Order off, and when he returned, I took up the course again. Unfortunately, even a one-week interruption in the process of a course of virtue seems to take some of the steam out of virtuousness. To add to my dilemma, I had already done much of the work for Order; thus, the week was easier than it should have been. The end result of all this was that I was being less than virtuous. And then along came Resolution.
But like my bus trip failure, I simply needed some relief and a second chance. What has been undone can be done again.
Chris’s guidance to me was generally in the form of written interpretations of Franklin’s, but occasionally we would meet over a glass of wine at a local café. At one of these, he told me that Resolution was all about second chances. Resolution, Chris explained, is about the belief in imagination, hoping, laughing, and loving. These things sound really good over a glass of red wine.
And so I resolved to set forth with renewed vigor. A second chance was all I needed (okay, technically a fifth, a sixth, maybe an eighth chance—the number is not important).
I was feeling good.
I’m sure you can imagine where all this was headed.
Undone by Email
Email.
The very word makes me shudder. If there is any single villain in my efforts to follow Franklin, it is email. If Resolution is Superman, emails are Kryptonite. Pervasive, invasive, insidious.
What did we do before email? It seems that 50 percent of my day is spent reading, responding, considering, or ignoring emails. And now, with the advent of web-enabled smartphones, they stalk us like emotionally disturbed exes. There should be someone you can call to get a restraining order against emails.
I find that emails have also engendered in me an irrational