Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [83]
Of course, there are Kelsey and my parents, but there had to be more. When I think of my influences—the people who have helped me not be disturbed at trifles—I see a painting that hangs in my basement. It’s not an expensive painting; in fact, I think it is a mass-produced lithograph. It is not a masterpiece—I don’t even know who painted it. It is, however, one of only two things I was interested in having from my grandmother’s effects when she passed away. To me it is priceless.
The painting depicts a small boy on a horse-drawn wagon crossing a stream near a grist mill. The boy is driving the team, and the old man beside him is leaning in and whispering words of encouragement. From the moment I saw the painting as a young boy, hanging on my grandparents’ wall, it was my favorite in the world, and the boy was me and the man my grandfather. When I think of Tranquillity, I think of him.
Harrison Gunn was a giant in his day. At six-foot-six, he towered over others. Despite his size, however, he was the gentlest of men. He never spoke harshly of others, I never saw him lose his temper, and he never seemed to be unhappy.
Like other people who grew up in the twenties and thirties, he might have had lots of reasons to be unhappy. He was born, raised, lived, and died on the same country road on which his father, and his father before him, had lived and died. He was forced to leave school early—I don’t think he made it past the sixth grade—to work cutting wood for local sawmills so that he could help support his family. He was never rich—the time and the place of his birth would not allow it. He never traveled very far. My grandmother (they had been together since grade school) never liked to travel. She grew up in the same small, rural settlement and seemed satisfied with her little slice of the world, so they stayed close to home.
So why was he happy? Why did he seem so at peace with himself? I’ve never thought much about it until now, and until Chris provided me with his take on the virtue of Tranquillity, I’m not sure I could have articulated it.
Chris told me that there are three principle stressors in the modern Western world: noise, technology, and the need for meaning. I buy that. Picture yourself in the middle of a busy city, trying to answer the hundredth email of the day, while consumed with feelings of existential self-doubt. Sort of sums up modern life. As I think back on my grandfather, it seems to me that he had the recipe for handling these stresses. Here is what I will call the Harrison Gunn formula for Tranquillity:
1. Find a hobby you enjoy and practice regularly. My grandfather loved to garden and to read. Dad once told me that if his father could have been anything, he would have been a farmer. He satisfied this unrequited dream with large household gardens, which provided much of the sustenance for his family. He grew vegetables and apples and berries and in his toil found pleasure. In books he found pleasure of another sort. For a man who worked in a paying job from the time before he was a teenager until his mid-seventies, books were his relaxation. I think they also provided that window to the world that he missed by being so firmly rooted to one place. Of course, it is not lost on me, when I think of the stressors of the modern world, that gardening and reading are activities of peace and simplicity. No noise, no technology, just peace.
2. Don’t let your world be consumed by electronics. I’m not sure how conscious a choice it was, but my grandparents had almost no modern technology in their home. That was, of course, a product of their times, but even late in the twentieth century, they were Luddites of the best kind. No computers, no digital cable. In fact, my grandparents watched almost no television. They watched the news and hockey. I don’t remember anything else. As a young boy, I was driven insane by their house—it was always so quiet. In hindsight, however, I might describe