Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [80]
An Obsession with Tranquillity
We, as North Americans—the citizens of this globe for that matter—are a great seething ball of self-manufactured stress. For some, it is the stress to be successful; for others, the pressure of a relationship. For many, it is a simple but wrenching daily struggle to survive. That said, much of what stresses us comes from the nature of our commercial, market-driven, materialistic society. It’s clear that we all need a little Tranquillity.
This is the virtue for which Franklin tells himself, and those who might follow: “Don’t worry about the little things” (okay, that’s not a direct quote, but you get the idea). As a man driven to achieve, Ben undoubtedly saw the need for some balance—a little peace to counter the push to succeed.
Even before Kelsey came along, I think I had a leg up on Tranquillity. My parents taught me that there are simply some things you cannot control, that most injuries (physical and psychological) are a long way from your heart, and that good things happen more often than bad. This is the one area in which I felt some sense of virtuous accomplishment. This is the one virtue in which I might educate rather than learn. I felt I should offer something practical—something more than vague platitudes. Being tranquil and teaching Tranquillity, however, are two very different things.
Can I articulate how I manage to be tranquil? What about Ben Franklin? Does he offer anything other than an admonition not to worry?
More than how to be tranquil, Franklin offers an example of why. His life was not without trials and hardships. He lived, of course, in a most unsettled time, but most of Franklin’s tribulations and setbacks were a product of his own willingness to risk and lose. Leaving his hometown of Boston as a young man, he cast himself into the world with virtually nothing and yet eventually managed to become one of America’s most influential citizens. He wrote in his autobiography of the contrast between the young man who arrived in Philadelphia, essentially penniless, and the man he was to become:
I have been the more particular in this description of my journey, and shall be so of my first entry into that city, that you may in your mind compare such unlikely beginnings with the figure I have since made there.
When he was settled in his new city, Franklin began the process of “making” himself. Eventually, on only the promise of credit from the governor of Pennsylvania, Sir William Keith, he crossed the ocean to London to buy supplies for a new printing business. When he arrived, he discovered that Keith’s promise of credit was worthless. Franklin was marooned in one of the world’s largest cities without the means to support himself. Instead of panicking, he went to work for two printers, further educating himself in his trade and developing new and important relationships. This was the nature of Franklin when confronted with crisis or setback. He simply made the best of it and generally emerged the better for the earlier loss. These were the actions of someone who understood the Tranquillity he preached in his autobiography.
All that said, he isn’t very specific about how one goes about not being disturbed at trifles. There are examples aplenty in his book about him forgiving slights or wrongs, but little about how he trained himself to do so. In Tranquillity, as in all the virtues, Franklin did not claim perfection, though he did suggest his descendants might well find that “to the joint influence of the whole mass of the virtues, even in the imperfect state he was able to acquire them, all that evenness of temper, and that cheerfulness in conversation.”
Have his descendants (in the broadest sense) learned his virtue? Have they reaped the benefit of his self-help?
If you were a child, as I was, in the seventies, then when you think of finding Tranquillity, your mind leaps to peace symbols and flower power and Allen Ginsberg. Rather than notions of stoic acceptance of injuries and injustices, I picture protest