The Question I Keep Getting
People sometimes ask me some version of the same question. It often comes up at lodge dinners, at Scout roundtables, at flotilla meetings, or in normal conversations. It usually sounds like this: “How do you have time for all of it?”
The honest answer is that I don’t. Nobody does. Time is not something a person has. It is something a person spends. The real question is what you decide to spend it on, and whether you can look at the ledger at the end of the year and say you got something out of it.
The second version of the question is harder. It is the one people ask when they have had a few minutes to look at the list. I wear a Theosophical symbol on a necklace. I hold the 32nd Degree in the Scottish Rite. I serve as a District Commissioner for Scouting America. I hold leadership in the Coast Guard Auxiliary. I do nonprofit work on the side. And I take part in The Strenuous Life, the self-improvement program built on the idea Theodore Roosevelt made famous. And the follow-up question, spoken or not, is: “Why?”
There are cheaper hobbies. Golf is one. Golf does not ask you to stand in a field at six in the morning with a troop of eleven-year-olds, and it does not ask you to inspect a boat in the cold. Golf asks very little of you, which is part of its appeal.
So here is the answer, and I will try to keep it short before I spend several thousand words on it. I do it because I took an oath. I meant it when I took it. I have not found a good reason to stop meaning it.
That’s the whole argument. The rest of this article is the working out of it.
A word before we start. This is not a brag sheet. I have read plenty of those. They tend to read like a man listing his own awards at his own funeral. The list of things I do is not the point, and it is certainly not the evidence of anything special about me. Plenty of people do more, and do it quieter, and do it better. If the list matters at all, it matters as a record of where one man tried to put his effort after he made a promise. Some of it worked. Some of it did not. All of it was work.
What the Oath Actually Asks
I am not going to describe the ritual of the Craft. That is not mine to give away, and I would not want it from a man who did. Anyone who has been through the degrees knows what was said and what was meant. Anyone who has not will have to take my word that it is not complicated, and that it is not theatrical in the way the movies would like it to be.
What I can say, because it is said in public by the fraternity itself, is what Freemasonry is for. It takes good men and gives them a framework for becoming better ones. It uses the tools of the stonemason as symbols. The square, the compass, the level, the plumb, the gavel, the chisel. It asks a man to work on the rough stone of his own character until it fits somewhere useful in the building.
That last part is the part people skip. A man does not improve himself in order to admire the result. He improves himself so he is fit for use. A stone that is perfectly shaped and sitting in a quarry is a rock. A stone that is rough and sitting in a wall is at least holding something up. The best stone is shaped and in the wall.
This is the core of what I took on. Two obligations, really, held together.
The first is toward self. Be a better man tomorrow than you were today. Master your passions. Keep your word. Tell the truth. Take the work of your own character seriously, because nobody else can do it for you and nobody else will.
The second is toward others. Relieve the distressed. Care for the widow and the orphan. Be useful to your brothers, your family, your neighbors, and the strangers you will never meet. Leave the community in better shape than you found it.
There is a temptation to treat these as two separate jobs, one private and one public. I think that is a mistake. They are one job. A man who works on himself and never serves anyone has built a very nice statue of himself. A man who serves everyone and never works on himself eventually burns out, or turns bitter, or does harm with good intentions. The two have to be run together, the way a ship needs both an engine and a rudder.
I have known men in the fraternity who treated the whole thing as a social club with a dress code. That is allowed. Nobody is checking. There is nothing wrong with fellowship, and a good dinner is a fine thing. But I do not think that is what the oath describes, and I do not think it is what most of us signed up for when we knelt at the altar and meant it.
I took it to mean something would be asked of me. I decided early that the right response to that was to say yes and then figure out how.
A Brief Word on Ordinary Obligations
Before I get into the more unusual parts of my list, I should mention the ordinary parts. A man who serves six organizations and neglects his own basic obligations has not taken any oath seriously. He has found a way to be admired in public while being unreliable in private.
I have thought about this a good deal. The test I try to use is simple. Am I a better man because of what I do, or a worse one? If my service makes me more patient, more organized, more present, and more generous, it is working. If it makes me tired, short, and gone, then it is a vice dressed up as a virtue.
I don’t always pass that test. I’ll say more about that later. But I want it on the table early, because the strenuous life has a failure mode, and the failure mode is a man who confuses motion with meaning. Roosevelt himself understood this. He did not praise busyness. He praised effort in service of something worth the trouble. There is a difference, and the difference is the whole point.
The Necklace
Now, the necklace.
I wear a pendant of the Theosophical seal. People notice it. Some ask about it. A few have assumed it is a Masonic emblem, which it is not. A few others, mostly the ones who have read something on the internet, have assumed it means something sinister. It does not. Let me explain what it is, and then explain why a Mason wears it.
The Theosophical Society was founded in New York City in 1875. The founders included Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a Russian-born writer and occultist, and Henry Steel Olcott, an American lawyer and veteran of the Civil War who had served as an investigator for the government before turning to the study of religion. Olcott is an interesting figure and gets less credit than Blavatsky. He was a practical man. He later moved to India and Ceylon, where he worked on education and was a significant figure in the revival of Buddhist schooling in Sri Lanka. A man who builds schools is hard to dismiss.
The Society has always described its aims in three parts. These have been worded slightly differently over the years, but the substance is steady. The first is to form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or color. The second is to encourage the comparative study of religion, philosophy, and science. The third is to investigate unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in humanity.
The motto is a Sanskrit line commonly rendered as “There is no religion higher than truth.”
The seal carries a handful of symbols. There is a serpent swallowing its own tail, which is an old image of cycles, renewal, and eternity. Inside the circle are two interlaced triangles, one pointing up and one pointing down, which many traditions have used to describe the relationship between the spiritual and the material, or the idea expressed in the old phrase “as above, so below.” There is an ankh, the Egyptian symbol of life. There is the Sanskrit syllable Om. And there is an ancient sun symbol, the swastika, which predates its twentieth century corruption by thousands of years and appears in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions as a mark of good fortune. The Society used it in that older sense. It is also the part of the seal that most people notice first and misunderstand fastest, and it is the reason many modern versions of the seal appear without it. I mention it plainly because pretending it is not there would be dishonest, and because a man who wears a symbol should know everything on it.
So that is the object. Why does a Scottish Rite Mason wear it?
It’s Not a Creed
First, a clarification, because it matters. Freemasonry is not Theosophy. Theosophy is not Freemasonry. Neither one is the other’s official branch, and a Masonic lodge does not endorse Theosophical doctrine. The Craft asks a man to believe in a Supreme Being and leaves the rest to his own conscience. It deliberately declines to tell him what his religion should be. That restraint is one of the wisest features of the whole institution. Two men can sit side by side in a lodge, one a Baptist and one a Jew, one a Muslim and one a Methodist, and be brothers without either of them surrendering a single article of his faith.
I don’t wear the Theosophical seal as a statement of doctrine. Nor do I ask you to accept every claim in every Theosophical book. I have read enough of the literature to know it contains a lot that is speculative, some that is questionable, and some that is simply wrong. A man should read widely and believe carefully.
I wear it as a reminder of a few things the seal points to, and I find those things worth carrying around my neck where I will notice them.
Truth Over Comfort
The motto is the first reason. “There is no religion higher than truth.” I cannot think of a better working rule for a person who is supposed to be seeking light.
There is a constant pull, in every organization and every life, toward comfortable falsehoods. The story that makes us look good. The version of events that spares our feelings. The slogan that lets us avoid a hard conversation. I have spent enough years in the military and in nonprofit work to know that most institutional failures are not caused by bad people. They are caused by decent people who were unwilling to say the true thing out loud in the meeting where it would have mattered.
A motto on a chain is a small defense against that. When I notice it, I ask whether I am being straight with myself and with the people around me. Most days the answer is yes. Some days it is a slow, annoyed no, and I go fix something.
The Broad Table
The first object of the Society, universal brotherhood without distinction, is not far from something Masons already believe. The fraternity has a long tradition of gathering men of different origins around one table. It has not always lived up to that, and its history includes real failures that honest members acknowledge. But the ideal is sound, and I would rather hold the ideal and work toward it than discard it because the record is imperfect.
In practice, that ideal shows up in my life in plain ways. Scouting serves youth from every background. The Auxiliary serves boaters of every kind. A vessel safety check works the same for every boat owner, whatever his politics. Nobody checks a voter registration card before they hand you a life jacket. That is about as clean a picture of brotherhood without distinction as I know.
The Comparative Study
The second object is the one I have enjoyed most. Study religion, philosophy, and science side by side, and do not assume any one of them has a monopoly on what is real or true.
This is a habit I picked up long before I ever read Blavatsky, and it fits with the Scottish Rite, which has always been a fraternity of study as much as ritual. The degrees of the Rite are built around moral and philosophical instruction. Albert Pike’s Morals and Dogma, which is still handed to new Scottish Rite Masons in the Southern Jurisdiction, is a dense, sprawling, sometimes maddening book that quotes everyone from Plato to the Vedas. It is not an easy read. It is not meant to be. It is meant to send a man to other books.
That is what the necklace does for me. It nudges me toward the shelf. It says: you are not done. Read something you disagree with. Read something older than your country. Ask what the sages of other traditions thought about suffering, duty, and death, and notice how often they landed in the same neighborhood.
I should add that my formal education includes a master’s degree in theology and conflict management, and that field has taught me something that the study of comparative religion also teaches. Most human disputes come from people mistaking their own map for the territory. The more maps you have seen, the less you are inclined to shoot a man for holding a different one.
The Serpent and the Long Game
The serpent biting its tail is the part I think about most on bad days. It describes a cycle. Things end and begin again. Effort goes into the ground and comes back as something else. No work is ever fully finished, and no work is wasted.
A sailor knows this in his bones. A ship is never done. You paint it, and the sea takes the paint. You stand a watch, and the next watch relieves you, and the watch after that relieves them. The work of keeping something afloat does not end. It gets handed on. I spent 22 years in a Navy that taught that lesson daily, and I have not found a better philosophy for service of any kind.
The necklace, then, is a small, plain instrument. A reminder to seek truth, to widen the circle, to keep studying, and to keep going. I am not interested in what it signals to anyone else. I am interested in what it says to me when I tuck it into my collar in the morning.
The Search for Light
The Mason talks about light. A new candidate is described as being in darkness and as seeking light. This language is old, and it can sound precious to the modern ear. I do not think it is precious. I think it is one of the more honest metaphors in the whole system.
Light, in the sense the Craft uses it, is knowledge. It is moral clarity. It is the ability to see what is in front of you and to see what you owe to it. A man in the dark does not know where he is or what he is stepping on. A man in the light can at least see the hole before he falls into it.
The search for light is not a one-time event. It is not something that happens at an initiation and then gets filed away. If it were, it would not be worth much. I find that the older I get, the more I understand how little I understood at the previous stage. At twenty-five I thought I knew a good deal. At thirty-five I knew I did not. At the present moment I know a little more about the shape of my ignorance, which is a modest kind of progress, but it is progress.
The habits of that search are not mysterious. They are unglamorous. They look something like this.
Read. Not only things that confirm what you already think. Read the hard thing, the old thing, the thing written by a person who would have disliked you.
Listen. Most of what I have learned that was worth knowing, I learned from somebody who knew more than I did and was kind enough to tell me. The older Masons in my lodge have forgotten more than I will ever learn. The right posture around them is to shut up and take notes.
Practice. Principles that are not practiced are decoration. A man who says he values patience and loses his temper in traffic does not value patience. He values the idea of patience, which is cheaper.
Admit error. This one is difficult and I am only moderately good at it. The military teaches you to be decisive. It does not always teach you to be wrong gracefully. That is a skill I have had to build on purpose, mostly by being wrong, in public, and surviving it.
Reflect. Take some time, even a few minutes, to review the day. What did I do well? What did I do badly? Who did I help, and who did I fail to help? A good lodge does this on a larger scale. A good man does it every night.
None of this requires special equipment. It does not require a necklace or a ring or an apron. It requires a decision to keep doing it. That is the secret. There is no secret. There is a decision, renewed each morning.
The Strenuous Life
In April of 1899, Theodore Roosevelt, then governor of New York, gave a speech to the Hamilton Club in Chicago. It was titled “The Strenuous Life.” It is a period piece in some respects. It carries the assumptions and the politics of its day, and some of those have not aged well, and I will not pretend otherwise. But the core of it has outlived the occasion.
Roosevelt argued that a nation, and a man, should not seek ease. He said that a life of ignoble ease was a poor ambition, and that the great things come to those who are willing to labor and risk for them. He praised effort. He praised duty. He praised the person who goes at hard work with a whole heart, and he had little patience for the person who stays on the sideline and sneers.
He later gave another speech, in Paris in 1910, which is better known today. It is the one about the man in the arena. The credit belongs not to the critic, he said, but to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marked by dust and sweat and blood, who errs and comes up short again and again, and who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and at the worst fails while daring greatly.
I have thought about that passage more than is probably healthy. It is useful because it is honest about the odds. The man in the arena is going to get hit. He is going to look foolish at some point. He is going to be criticized by people who have never risked anything. The only way to avoid all of that is to stay out of the arena, and Roosevelt’s point was that staying out is the larger failure.
It is worth knowing that Roosevelt was a Freemason. He was raised in Matinecock Lodge No. 806 in Oyster Bay, New York, in 1901, the same year he became president. He was proud of it and spoke well of the fraternity. I do not want to make too much of that. A great many public men have been Masons, and the lodge is no guarantee of anything. But the overlap between the Roosevelt ideal and the Masonic ideal is real. Both ask a man to build himself. Both ask him to build something outside himself. Both treat idleness as a kind of theft, a withholding of what you owe.
What the Strenuous Life Is Not
I want to be careful here, because the phrase has been used to justify things I do not endorse.
It is not an excuse for aggression. Roosevelt’s era confused strenuous effort with imperial adventure, and the confusion cost a lot of people a lot of grief. I draw a hard line between effort that builds and effort that dominates.
It is not a cult of suffering. There is a modern habit of bragging about how little a person sleeps and how hard he grinds. It is a poor imitation of discipline. A tired man makes bad decisions. A man who has not eaten, rested, or tended his health is not demonstrating virtue. He is demonstrating a lack of planning.
It is not a contest, whatever the leaderboard says. The point of effort is not to out-labor the man next to you. It is to find out what you are capable of and to put that capacity to use. Somebody will always work harder than you do. Somebody will always be more talented. If your motivation depends on winning that contest, it will fail you the first time you lose.
And it is not a replacement for rest or faith. The strenuous life, understood correctly, includes the strenuous work of being a good friend and a good neighbor. Those jobs are harder than any committee chair. The man who gives everything to the lodge and nothing to the people in front of him has misread the assignment.
What It Is
It is a refusal to coast.
That is about as short as I can make it. The strenuous life is the decision not to coast. It is the decision to treat your capacity as a trust rather than an entertainment. You were given a body, a mind, some years, and some opportunities, and you are expected to do something with them. Not something spectacular. Something useful.
I take that decision seriously because I can see what the alternative looks like. I have known people who coasted. Some of them were very pleasant. They were never in any trouble. They also never built anything, never taught anyone anything, and never left a room better than they found it. When they passed away, the eulogies had a hard time finding material.
I would like the eulogy to have material. Not out of vanity. Out of a plain sense that it would mean I used the thing I was given.
The Physical Part
A word on the body, since Roosevelt cared about it and so should anyone who wants to be of use. He was a sickly child with severe asthma, and he built himself up through deliberate physical effort. He boxed, hiked, rode, and rowed. He did not do it for vanity. He did it because he believed a weak body made for a weaker will, and he was not willing to let the body set the limits.
I do not claim to be an athlete. But I have found that physical discipline and moral discipline lean on each other. The morning you get up and do the hard workout is the morning you are more likely to do the hard task at the office. The habit of doing the unwelcome thing, on schedule, without negotiating with yourself, is a habit that carries over. Fitness is not about the mirror. It is about whether you can show up when the work needs doing, whether that work is hauling gear, loading a boat, or carrying a pack up a ridge with a dozen Scouts behind you.
A man who intends to be of use for many years ought to maintain the equipment. That is not vanity. It is maintenance. A Sailor understands maintenance. You do not wait for the engine to fail. You service it on a schedule, and you log it.
Why Several Things and Not One
People sometimes suggest I would be more effective if I picked one thing and gave it everything. There’s probably something to that. Focus has real value, and I will concede that the case for narrowing is a strong one.
Here is why I have not narrowed completely.
Each of these organizations teaches me something the others cannot. Scouting teaches me about young people and the long, patient work of forming character. The Auxiliary teaches me about operations, safety, and public service with a federal partner. The Strenuous Life teaches me about daily accountability, and about how little of self-improvement is insight and how much of it is answering the check-in honestly. The lodge teaches me about reflection and fellowship, and gives me a set of symbols to think with. My nonprofit work teaches me how institutions actually run, and why so many of them struggle.
These are not separate pursuits. They feed each other. A lesson I learn in a flotilla meeting gets applied at a Scout roundtable. An idea from a nonprofit board shows up in a fire company budget conversation. The cross-pollination is part of the value. A man who serves in only one place tends to see the world through only one window.
There is a practical argument, too. The problems in these organizations tend to be similar. Volunteer recruitment. Retention. Training. Leadership transition. Money. Communication. Burnout. Paperwork. When you see the same problem in four organizations, you start to see the pattern, and when you see the pattern, you can sometimes help.
But I will also say this plainly. There is a limit, and I try to respect it. If a commitment is no longer serving the mission or the people, the honest thing is to hand it off, and to hand it off well. I have done that. It was not fun. It was correct.
Scouting: The District Commissioner’s Job
I serve as the District Commissioner in the Old Dominion District of the Colonial Virginia Council. Scouting America, the organization many people still remember as the Boy Scouts of America, carries a long record and a lot of opinions. I am not going to litigate the organization’s history here. I will tell you what I think the job is, because it is the part of my list people understand least.
A Commissioner does not run a troop. The Scoutmaster runs the troop. The Cubmaster runs the pack. The committee supports them, the chartered organization sponsors them, and the parents do an amazing amount of unpaid driving. The Commissioner’s role is to serve the units. That is the whole job. Help the leaders succeed. Visit. Listen. Spot problems early. Connect a struggling unit with a thriving one. Make sure somebody has the training, the paperwork, the recruiting help, or the plain encouragement they need.
It is, in a very real sense, a job built around service to the people who serve. A Commissioner is a coach to coaches. The Scouts rarely know the Commissioner’s name, and that is how it should be. If I do my work well, a volunteer Scoutmaster has a better year, and a patrol of twelve-year-olds has a better campout, and none of them ever has to wonder why.
The Scout Oath asks a young person to do his or her best, to do their duty to God and country, to help other people at all times, and to keep themselves physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight. The Scout Law is a list of twelve traits, and any adult who reads it honestly will find at least three he is not currently managing. I find a new one every year.
What strikes me, every time, is how closely the Scout Oath and the Masonic obligation rhyme. Both ask for self-mastery. Both ask for service. Both assume that character is built through repeated small choices rather than announced in speeches. The vocabulary differs, and the age of the participants differs, but the structure is the same. Work on yourself. Be useful. Do it again tomorrow.
Robert Baden-Powell, who founded the Scouting movement, is credited with a line from his farewell message to Scouts that has become a kind of motto for the whole enterprise: try to leave the world a little better than you found it. He wrote it near the end of his life. It is the cleanest summary of the ethic I am describing in this article, and I did not have to look far for it. It has been printed on the back of Scout handbooks for a century.
I should point out something else about Baden-Powell. He built a movement for boys out of what he had learned as a soldier. Tracking, signaling, self-reliance, camp craft, observation. He took the skills of a profession that deals in hard consequences and turned them into a way of raising decent young people. I come from a profession that deals in hard consequences, too. There is a reason so many veterans find their way into Scouting. We know how much of competence is simply preparation, and we know that preparation can be taught to a ten-year-old with a length of rope and a patient adult.
What Kids Actually Learn
The popular image of Scouting is knots and badges. Those exist. They are not the point.
The point is a patrol of six or eight young people, left to run their own camp under the eye of an adult who is deliberately not helping. They cook dinner badly. They pitch a tent crooked. It rains. Somebody forgot something important. And they figure it out, because there is no one else to figure it out for them. That is the method. A young person learns to lead by being handed something real to lead, and learns to follow by following someone who is also learning.
Adults find this very hard to watch. Everything in you wants to fix it. The discipline of a good Scouter is to stand there with your mouth shut and let the group have the experience, while keeping everyone safe. I have found that discipline useful in every other part of my life, including meetings of adults who are somehow less capable of working it out than the patrol.
The result, over years, is the point. A boy or a girl who has spent six years learning to plan, to cook, to navigate, to settle a dispute, to take responsibility, and to help a younger Scout is a different kind of young adult than one who has spent those years in front of a screen. I have seen it enough times that I do not need a study to tell me. Though there are studies, and they say what you would expect.
That is one of the clearest examples I know of leaving things better. You do not do it by shouting. You do it by providing a structure, showing up, and being patient for a very long time. Most of the people you help will not remember your name. Some of them will become the adults you would want running things when you are old.
The Coast Guard Auxiliary
The United States Coast Guard Auxiliary is the uniformed civilian volunteer component of the Coast Guard. Congress established it in 1939. Its members are not enlisted or commissioned. They are volunteers who wear a uniform, hold qualifications, and support the Coast Guard’s missions in areas that do not require armed or law enforcement authority. Recreational boating safety, vessel safety checks, public education, patrol support, and a good deal of administrative and operational help are among the main ones.
I serve as a Flotilla Commander in the Smithfield Flotilla. A flotilla is the basic unit of the Auxiliary, a local group of volunteers. It is a small command, but it is a real one, and it carries a real weight of responsibility. People in my flotilla give their own time and their own money to do this. Many of them use their own boats and their own fuel. They do it because they believe in the mission, and it is my job not to waste their trust.
Leadership in a volunteer organization is a different craft from leadership in the active-duty military. I learned that quickly and sometimes painfully. In the Navy, a Chief can give a direction and expect it to be carried out. That is not a flaw in the Navy. It is a design feature of an institution that deals in life and death on short notice. In a volunteer organization, nobody is required to do anything. Every task is a request. Every request has to be worth the person’s evening.
That changes how you lead. You have to explain the reasons. You have to listen. You have to match the task to the person. You have to say thank you, and mean it, and say it often. You have to make the paperwork lighter than it wants to be. You have to remember that a volunteer who feels used will quietly leave, and nobody will ever hear why.
It has been, without exaggeration, some of the most useful leadership training I have ever received, and I received it after I retired. A man can be a competent chief and still have a lot to learn about leading people who owe him nothing.
Why It Matters
A vessel safety check is a small thing. A volunteer examiner boards a recreational boat, at the owner’s invitation, and checks the equipment. Life jackets, fire extinguisher, flares, navigation lights, sound signals, and so on. It takes a few minutes. If the boat passes, the owner gets a decal. If not, the owner gets a polite list of what to fix, with no penalty.
It sounds trivial, but it’s not. Boating accidents are not primarily caused by bad luck. They are caused by missing equipment, poor preparation, alcohol, and inexperience. A life jacket that is worn does more than a life jacket that is in the locker. A flare that works is better than a flare that has been expired since before the last administration. Every one of those checks is a small chance to prevent a very bad day on the water.
I think of it as the ordinary form of heroism. Nobody sings about the man who checked the fire extinguisher. But somewhere, on some summer afternoon, there is a family that did not become a statistic because somebody took ten minutes to look at their boat and tell them the truth.
The Auxiliary also teaches boating safety classes, supports regattas and marine events, assists with search and rescue operations in supporting roles, and works with the Coast Guard on a long list of tasks that free the active-duty members for the work only they can do. It is a force multiplier, in the proper sense of that overused phrase. A few hundred volunteers can do what no budget would otherwise pay for.
I also believe the Auxiliary needs honest attention. Any institution that has been around a long time collects habits that serve the institution rather than the mission. I have written about that elsewhere, and I will not repeat it here, but I will say that wanting an organization to be better is a form of loyalty, not disloyalty. The Masonic tradition understands this. You do not criticize the lodge because you hate it. You criticize it because you want it to be worthy of the men who sit in it.
The Other Rooms
The Rest of the List
I also work with other community groups as I am able. I will not list them all, partly because the list is long and partly because it is not the point. The point is the habit. When someone asks for help with something worthwhile and I have the capacity, I try to say yes. When I do not have the capacity, I try to say so clearly rather than saying yes and failing quietly.
That last rule has saved me a lot of trouble. A clean no is a gift. A sloppy yes is a debt.
The Thread That Ties It Together
It would be easy to read this list and see a man who just joins things. That is not quite right.
I think the more accurate reading is this. There is one project, and it has several workshops. The project is to become a person of use. The workshops are the lodge, the district, the flotilla, the consulting desk, and the daily check-in of The Strenuous Life. Each one has different tools and a different crew. All of them are turning out the same product, which is a slightly more capable man and a slightly better community.
The Masonic tradition gives me the language for that project. The Scout Oath gives me a version of it that I can explain to a child. The Navy gave me the habits. The Auxiliary and the district give me ways to practice. The Theosophical seal around my neck reminds me to keep the search broad and honest. And The Strenuous Life gives me a name, and a daily structure, for the attitude that holds the rest together.
None of it is complicated. All of it is demanding.
The Objections
I would be a poor student of the Craft if I did not take the objections seriously. A man who only listens to people who agree with him is not seeking light. He is decorating a room. So let me take up the common ones.
“Isn’t This Just Ego?”
Sometimes, yes. I would be lying if I said no.
Anyone who takes on leadership roles has to ask himself why. Some of the answers are noble. Some are not. There is a part of every volunteer that enjoys being needed, enjoys the title, enjoys the nod of recognition from across the room. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
The test I use is a practical one. Would I do the work if no one knew about it? Would I do the unglamorous parts? The folding chairs, the data entry, the late-night phone calls, the third meeting about the same budget line? If the answer is yes, then the ego is a passenger, not the pilot. If the answer is no, I should probably step aside and let someone take the job who wants the work rather than the credit.
The Masonic tradition has a decent defense against this, which is the ancient instruction that charity should be done quietly. The left hand should not know what the right hand is doing. I have tried to follow that, with uneven results. Writing this article is, I am aware, a slight violation of it. I am doing it because the question of why a person does this kind of work is worth answering, and because I think a plain account might encourage someone else to start. If it reads as bragging, I have failed, and I would ask you to take the principle and leave the author.
“Isn’t Theosophy a Little Strange for a Mason?”
Perhaps. Freemasonry has always had a complicated relationship with the wider currents of Western esoteric thought. Some Masons have embraced them. Some have kept their distance. Both positions are honorable. The fraternity does not require anyone to read Blavatsky, and I would not push her on a brother who did not want her.
What I will say is that the Craft has never asked a man to stop thinking. It has asked him to keep his mind open and his conscience clear. If a symbol on a chain helps me remember that the truth outranks my comfort, that the circle of brotherhood should be wide, and that learning has no finish line, then I do not see the harm. I am not asking the lodge to adopt it. I am only wearing it.
I also keep a healthy skepticism toward the more fantastical claims that cluster around the esoteric world. I have been in the military long enough to prefer evidence. I am happy to be fascinated by an idea without being convinced by it. That is a perfectly good way to read.
“Is This Sustainable?”
That is the best objection, and I do not have a perfect answer.
There is a real risk in the life I am describing. Burnout is real. Overcommitment is real. A man can wear himself thin and call it virtue. I have seen it happen to people I respect, and I have come close myself.
The things that help are not exotic. Sleep. Exercise. A calendar that tells the truth. A willingness to say no. A willingness to hand things off. A habit of taking a real day off. Good time management skills. A circle of friends who will tell you when you are being an idiot. And an honest review, a couple of times a year, of what is working and what is not.
I also think the right attitude is that you are not the only one. Every organization I serve has been around longer than I have and will outlast me. I am a link in a chain, not the chain. My job is to do my part well, train the next person, and hand it over in better shape. A man who cannot step back is not indispensable. He is a bottleneck.
The strenuous life, properly understood, is not meant to be lived at maximum all the time. It is meant to be lived with purpose. There is a difference between a marathon runner and a man being chased by a bear, and the first one lasts longer.
The Failures
An article like this tends to read as a record of success. That is misleading, and I would not want a younger person to come away believing that this is how it feels from the inside.
I have missed things I should have attended. I have said yes to things I should have declined, and declined things I should have taken. I have been short with people who did not deserve it. I have been slow to listen. I have sat in meetings convinced I was right and been wrong. I have let a good idea die because I was too tired to fight for it. I have made decisions that looked sensible at the time and turned out poorly, and I have had to explain them to the people who paid for them.
I mention these things not for effect, but because they are the real material of the strenuous life. The Craft does not say a man will become perfect. It says he is a rough stone and he will be worked on, and anyone who has watched a stone being worked knows that it involves a lot of chips on the floor.
The skill is not in avoiding mistakes. It is in handling them well. Name the error. Fix what can be fixed. Apologize to whoever was hurt. Learn the lesson. Do not wallow, and do not make excuses. Then get back to work.
The Navy has a phrase for this, which is not elegant but is effective: you own it. Whatever happened, on your watch, is yours. That is a harder standard than it sounds, and a more freeing one. A man who owns his mistakes is not afraid of them.
What I Hope It Adds Up To
I do not expect a monument. I would be a little embarrassed by one. But I would like to think that when the final accounts are tallied, a few things will be true.
A few Scouts will have turned into capable adults, and one or two of them will have turned around and led the next generation. A few volunteers in my flotilla will have felt that their time was respected and well used. A few boaters will have come home who might not have. A few nonprofits will have run a bit more smoothly. A few brothers in the lodge will have been able to say that I did what I said I would do.
And I would like to think that I will have kept the oath. Not perfectly. Not even especially well. But seriously.
That is the real standard. Not whether a man was great, but whether he was faithful. Not whether he finished the work, but whether he kept at it. The old operative masons who built the cathedrals did not live to see them finished. They laid stones for a building that would stand for centuries after their names were forgotten. I find that a consoling thing to think about. You do not have to finish the work. You have to do your share of it, well, and leave the site in good order for the next crew.
For the Man Who Is Wondering
If you are reading this and thinking about a similar path, here is the advice, delivered with the understanding that it is worth what you paid for it.
Start small. Pick one thing. Show up. Do the unglamorous work. Learn the names of the people around you. Keep your word. Ask questions. Do the training. Take the criticism. Find an older person who is good at it and watch how they do it. Find a younger person who wants to learn and teach them what you know.
Do not announce your intentions. Do the work and let the work speak.
Protect your health. Protect your integrity. If a commitment starts to compromise either one, reconsider it.
Read something hard once in a while. Pray, meditate, walk in the woods, or sit in silence, whatever your tradition prescribes. Keep some part of your life that belongs to the question of what it is all for.
And when you fail, which you will, treat it as information. Adjust. Return to the work.
There is no shortcut. That is the encouraging part, in its way. Anyone can do it, because it only requires doing it.
Closing
I wear the necklace because I want a plain reminder to seek the truth. I wear the apron when called, and I try to live the obligation when I am not wearing it. I hold the commission in the Scouting district because the next generation deserves capable adults who show up. I hold the flotilla because a boat that passes inspection is a family that goes home. I take on the nonprofit work because good organizations deserve good operations. And I try, as best I can, to live the strenuous life, with a daily check-in to keep me honest, because the alternative is to waste what I was given.
I am not special. I am not finished. I am a dude who took an oath and decided it meant what it said.
There is light to be found. There is work to be done. The world is in a certain condition, and I would like to leave it in a slightly better one.
That is the whole thing. Now, if you will excuse me, there is a meeting I must attend.