Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [96]
“Bob, did you give these little gems of advice to a lot of students?”
“Oh, sure,” he replied. “Sometimes I would see someone who needed a little kick in the pants and so I’d tell them what was what. Adults don’t tell kids what they need to hear enough.”
And I realized that the moment truly had come full circle. The lesson was really now complete. Only my own self-centeredness—my hubris—had led me to believe that this was a watershed moment for anyone other than me. I was so arrogant that I thought this was some priceless counsel passed to a favorite student. In truth, it was just one bit of friendly advice among many from a caring teacher. A kick in the pants for someone who needed it. I wasn’t the hero of this episode; Bob was.
Now that was a lesson in Humility.
Thanks, Bob Gillis. Thanks to all my teachers. Thanks, Benjamin Franklin.
HUMILITY
{CONCLUSION}
The End and the Beginning
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN “CONCEIV’D THE BOLD AND ARDUOUS PROJECT OF arriving at moral perfection” because he wanted to “live without committing any fault at any time.” He undertook the course both for practical and spiritual reasons. In the end, he wrote that he “ow’d the constant felicity of his life, down to his 79th year” to the venture.
{ If you would not be forgotten As soon as you are dead and rotten, Either write things worthy reading, Or do things worth the writing.}
I decided to follow Franklin’s course of virtues as I stood in front of a magazine stand in a drugstore while I waited for a bus. I think that I had just bought some deodorant.
How did a Founding Father and a father too often lost get mixed up together in seeking moral perfection?
Before I get too far into such a weighty question, let me offer one more confession, one more mea culpa.
I lied. Again (for a guy who claims to treasure Sincerity so much, I seem to do that a lot).
I said in the beginning of this book that it would not contain any of the answers to life’s fundamental questions. After thirteen-plus weeks of somewhat virtuous behavior, I might say that I was no closer to understanding the nature of the universe than I would have been had I watched continuous reruns of Laverne and Shirley. Go back to “The Preparations” and you’ll see that I warned you.
The truth, however, is that there are some answers to the big questions—some gems of hidden knowledge—revealed within the pages of this book. Some you may have stumbled upon yourself, others you may need my assistance to uncover. Let’s have a look at them together.
First, and this is probably the most obvious, I am no Benjamin Franklin. No course of virtue, no weekly lesson in moral perfection, is going to make me (or anyone else) into Citizen Ben. He was an extraordinary man with extraordinary gifts. I’m an average guy with heretofore undiscovered gifts (I can juggle, my pencil sketches are okay, and I make a pretty good cheesecake).
That does not mean that it was a mistake to follow Ben. He invited it, in fact. He wrote of his course:
I hope, therefore, that some of my descendants may follow the example and reap the benefit.
Thus, though I may be no Franklin, in any sense of the word, for thirteen weeks I have felt his hand on my shoulder, guiding me through this course. I may not be him, now or ever, but after the thirteen weeks, I felt (and feel) a little closer to him. Actually, with all the false starts, mix-ups, and mistakes, the course took more than thirteen weeks, but what’s a few weeks when you’re seeking moral perfection?
Great Truth No. 2 is equally obvious. There is no such thing as moral perfection. Ultimately Franklin acknowledged as much. He wrote, in his own reflections on the course, that moral perfection was an impossible goal. Even in his failures, however, he saw no loss in the attempt.