Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [67]
I understood and appreciated his rant (though I should have encouraged him to tone it down just a little bit—no need to go to extremes). Somewhere inside me, there is an extremist yelling and protesting against the innate conservatism of my existence. Stop being Mr. Cleaver, I tell myself. Jump out of airplanes, go heli-skiing, race cars. But I do none of these things. Instead, I am careful. I walk down the center of the road (ensuring that the road has previously been closed for my safety), find the balance in all things. Even on those occasions when I seek to cast off the chains of my Moderation, I usually just trip over them.
When I was graduating from college, I decided I needed to experience the world outside North America. My university had a small library dedicated specifically to this type of wanderlust. Would it be teaching English in Korea or tutoring in Japan? Maybe I could do some sort of charity work in Africa. The more I researched, the more my moderate self protested, “Whoa, big fella! Let’s not wander too far out of the yard. It’s a dangerous world out there. How about a weekend in the city?”
Finally, I rejected all notions of altruism and decided on a backpacking trip through Europe. I even convinced my cousin to go with me. It was more moderate than my first notions of my postgraduate activities, yet it still had a sense of adventure for me. I scrimped and saved, divested myself of all worldly possessions, and readied myself for my European escapade. I was heading out into the big, bad world. Moderation be damned.
On the first night of the trip, not long after stepping off the plane in Brussels, my backpack was stolen from a locker room in our hostel. “Told you so,” said my inner moderate.
My reaction to this Day 1 theft was to hop on a train and flee Belgium. Actually, not just Belgium but all of Continental Europe. My cousin and I didn’t stop until we had passed through France, crossed a small portion of the Atlantic and all of the Celtic Sea. We didn’t take a breath until we hit Ireland. I think I chose Ireland because it was more familiar. There is enough Irish in me that after my misadventure in Brussels, Dublin seemed almost like home.
Of course, the cost of replacing my stolen clothes meant that my trip money was dwindling faster than I had expected (and replacing clothes for a six-foot-three man in Ireland proved more difficult than I’d expected; the Irish, from whom I am in part descended, are evidently a vertically challenged people). The whole debacle dramatically shortened my time in Europe. Indeed, it would turn the backpacking adventure into an extended vacation. My six-month trip turned into less than six weeks.
I’ve always blamed the early termination of the trip on the cost of buying new clothes, but in truth, it was just a manifestation of a middle-of-the-road personality. An unscripted free-flowing journey across unknown countries was too much for me—too extreme. A nice, long vacation was far more acceptable. It was moderate.
So for me, Moderation should have been just another day. At least I should have had no trouble with the acquisition of this virtue.
But as I approached this, the ninth virtue, I knew that this milquetoast, overly safe vision of Moderation was not what Franklin had in mind. Ben was not Mr. In-Between.
Ben took risks. Ben did things. Ben changed the world. He gambled and was rewarded. These are not the actions of a moderate in any sense of the word. So what did Franklin mean when he instructed himself to be moderate?
Alan Houston explains Franklin’s Moderation as part of his self-created scheme, five decades in the making, of winning people over to his side of any issue. According to Houston, it was simply a form of politeness:
Politeness was the virtue of a sensible