13 Virtues

I have brunch on Saturdays with a new but close friend of mine here in Chennai. I’ll call him J here.  J and I connect about a variety of things when we hang out, but there’s a constant theme that emerges each Saturday of the desire for personal improvement. For each of us, the move to Chennai was about inviting change into our lives and fully embracing that new energy. Both of us thinks it is important to establish here regular practices that invite more richness and opportunities for reflection into our lives. So, in partnership with J,  we’ve borrowed several pages from Ben Franklin’s guide to life and are setting off in 2014 to live according to his 13 virtues.

Franklin established his thirteen virtues as a way to shape his life in pursuit of excellence while achieving balance and moderation.  While he practiced all of them concurrently, J  and I will focus on practicing one per week for the next year. It starts with Temperance: eat not to dullness and drink not to elevation. The next one was Silence: speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation. For me, these weeks were amazing.

During the Temperance week I was quickly aware of the challenge I faced: food. Despite not missing more than perhaps a dozen or so meals in my life, and never more than one in a row, I grew up thinking I had to eat as much as possible because I didn’t know when the next round of food would turn up. Not drinking is easy for me because I can think about alcohol as a special occasion sort of thing, but I eat at least three times a day. I was concerned at first, but I was doing great. I even recognized quickly how eating less at certain points in the day resulted in more energy at other times. “Hey, I like this,” I thought.

Then came Wednesday.

On Wednesday I decided that I needed to let go of something that I’d been holding onto tightly for a long time, and it was hindering me in a couple of noticeable ways that I couldn’t avoid any longer. I decided it was time to let it go, and I figured I needed to be somewhat ritualistic about it: I wrote a letter, reworked it a few times to get it just right, and symbolically put it out there. Although I didn’t like it one bit, I noticed a release. That night, I wanted to eat the world. Hello Temperance!

I was feeling lots of emotions, and I wanted to cover them up with delicious little (and big) bits of something that would make me feel better. Yikes. I don’t know if I’d have recognized all this if I hadn’t been following Franklin’s lead. Upon further reflection, it turns out that food is a crutch I’ve used more than I realized. This was an keen awareness to notice and feel in real time and to see in retrospect.

The weekend came, and the next up on the virtue list was Silence. I was slightly uneasy on the onset of this virtue of the week because I already knew that one of the few things I do more than eat is talk. The week was indeed a struggle — I constantly second-guessed myself about what I was saying. One example comes from a meeting I was in late in the week where I was evaluating a process at my school that involves both teachers and students, and I felt challenged in a moment I wouldn’t have even thought about previously. Normally, I’d strike like a lightning bolt at the main issues; this time I had to evaluate carefully what I wanted to say and whether it was going to benefit myself or others. I paused a long time — enough for the storm of thoughts to smooth out a bit in my mind. I’m still not sure if I got on the right side of Silence in that conversation, but a new pathway was formed, at least partially, last week.

I’m just over two weeks into this, but here’s what comes to mind right now: Franklin’s virtues were about striving for moderation. While I knew moderation was his goal coming into this practice, what I’m now feeling quite acutely is that moderation requires a level of mindfulness — constant mindfulness, in fact — that I’d completely underestimated. I’m someone who meditates a lot, I’ve been on a couple of lengthy silent retreats, and I even once traveled to other countries seeking meditation practices. I thought I was dialed into mindfulness. Following Franklin has invited a “walking consciousness” that I hadn’t expected when I started with this experience. One virtue a week has seemed to sharpen my awareness to little moments in real time where the shifting is occurring. Little moments, but the impact is anything but small. And as an added benefit, at the end of the week, I don’t want to let go of the previous week’s virtue. They naturally build on each other and stick around. That Franklin was onto something.