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Imitation leads, Chris cautioned, to dependence and immaturity. If we are constantly gauging our behavior by our perception of another person’s actions, we fail to grow our own intellectual and spiritual strength, we fear having a novel thought, and we allow our own ethical maturity to lie dormant.

For once, I might have been ahead of the curve. Promising, as I did, not to make this a book about religion, I do not need to digress too deeply into my own spiritual past. Suffice it to say that I was raised and remain a Christian, but I’ve never been too doctrinaire about it. I decided I wouldn’t be slavishly imitating anyone. I still, however, needed to do something.

Chris offered a little more advice and explained that there are four stages of learning, and Humility is a key component.

First: “I don’t know that I don’t know.” We all start off not aware of what is beyond our comprehension. This seems all too familiar.

Step 1 quickly leads to Step 2. When Step 1 is revealed to us, if we accept the truth of it, we are struck by our inadequacy and we whisper, “I now know that I don’t know.”

This, Chris told me, is where Humility is key. If we revert to a position based on the fear of looking stupid and defend our original misinformed belief, then we will never get further.

“I don’t know that I know” is Step 3, a place Chris describes as the wilderness of unknowing, a frightening transition time during which we wander without direction, searching and hoping for a pathway—a place where we are closer to our goal than we realize. It is an intuitive place, where we must trust in our intuitive self to guard us from misplaced boasts and misguided presumptions. If we do, we may move on to Step 4, the final stage—when the light comes on and we finally can say to ourselves, “Now I know that I know.”

So there I was, somewhere in the first stage of learning, expecting very soon to “know I don’t know” anything about Humility, when once again, I was offered a real-world lesson on virtue. This time it came from the imagination of a twelve-year-old boy.

Several years ago my cousin, a woman who lives thousands of miles away and whom I see only every decade or so, was injured in a car accident. It was a serious accident, and she and her husband were lucky to survive. Sadly, she was left permanently disabled. Kathy, at just over forty years old and the mother of a young boy, was blind.

It is with some shame that I acknowledge that I did not one thing for her. Not a get-well-soon card, not a call to say I was thinking of her. Nothing. Wrapped up in my own busy life, sheltered by the miles between us, I did no more than offer sympathetic platitudes when my mother gave me periodic updates on her condition. It was not one of my bright, shining moments.

Then, two years plus after the accident, and in the midst of my final week of Franklin’s virtues—a week devoted to Humility—I received the following poem written by her twelve-year-old son.

BLIND

The blind, you think they are slow

You think they are stupid

But they are just like you, they are very intelligent, they have lives

They are hard to understand because they have to learn—they are

very odd, but if you get to know them, they will tell you a story

So don’t look at them strange and don’t call them stupid

they are already learning how to read—learning how to read

bumps is kind

of hard—you think they are just people trying to make a living in

the world,

so try and cut them slack.

There is no such thing as stupid or rolling your eyes

because they can’t see you so the joke’s on you

If you roll your eyes they won’t care because

they can’t see.

They don’t care if you make fun of them and they

don’t care if you call them stupid, so if you think they are stupid

you’re going to get the same reply—wait your turn please.

Here was a boy who had moved way past “I now know that I don’t know.” I’d say he is in that brief shining moment when he can say, “Now I know that I know.”

How’s that for making you humble? How’s that for