Building Capacity in the Mundane Middle

We begin the week by challenging the idea that strength is built during a crisis. Just as you wouldn't wait for an emergency to start going to the gym, the capacity to handle life's stresses must be cultivated during "the regular day" rather than in moments of extreme joy or hardship.

Key Highlights:

• The Crisis Assumption: A crisis assumes you already have the capacity to respond; it is the wrong time to try and build it.
• The Mundane Middle: Real Masonic practice happens in the ordinary moments of life, preparing you for the extremes.
• Cultivating Resilience: Resilience is the ability to tolerate, endure, and thrive across a broader range of everyday life without being pulled off center.
• Today’s Reflection: If you find yourself "flying off the handle" at small things, recognize it as an opportunity to begin the work of building resilience.

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• Tim Dedman
• Jorge

Creators and Guests

Host

Brian Mattocks

Host and Founder of A Mason's Work - a podcast designed to help you use symbolism to grow. He's been working in the craft for over a decade and served as WM, trustee, and sat in every appointed chair in a lodge - at least once :D

What is A Mason's Work?

In this show we discuss the practical applications of masonic symbolism and how the working tools can be used to better yourself, your family, your lodge, and your community. We help good freemasons become better men through honest self development. We talk quite a bit about mental health and men's issues related to emotional and intellectual growth as well.

[00:00] imagine, imagine you only went to the gym when you felt like you needed to be strong,
[00:07] not like on a schedule, not as a regular thing, not as a practice or any of that kind of stuff,
[00:15] but only when you felt weak or outmatched, uh, or unable to do a thing you needed to do.
[00:22] How do you think that would work? Right? Like I need to lift this car up off of somebody who's
[00:27] injured. Now I'm going to try and be strong. How do you think that's going to work long-term?
[00:33] Right? You'll find, I think, just like everybody that the moment you need capacity, the moment you
[00:40] need a capability is probably the wrong time to try and build it. The crisis does not wait for you to
[00:50] get ready. The crisis is here and it assumes that you have the capacity to respond.
[00:58] When we talk about our work internally, our, uh, capacity to solve problems and deal with the
[01:07] stresses of everyday life, it becomes very obvious very quickly that you kind of wish you had started
[01:14] years ago. Right? And it's that old, uh, the old proverb, like when's the best time to plant a tree,
[01:20] uh, was 20 years ago. The second best time is, is now when we look at developing the ability to
[01:31] respond and interact and change the environment around us. Um, the, the thing you want to make space
[01:38] for is the practice in the moment in the mundane middle, if, if you will, not the extremes of your
[01:49] everyday life, not the really tough times and not the really joyful times. It's the regular day is when
[01:58] the practice and profession of Freemasonry starts to become an important and meaningful activity.
[02:06] We can all have, uh, really bad days and, uh, and those peak experiences as well. Those really great
[02:15] and amazing days. And, uh, as those happen, when they happen for the various reasons that they do,
[02:23] uh, it's important to know that very little that you're going to do in those moments is going to
[02:30] meaningfully change the outcome if you don't have the ability to respond. What does that mean? What does
[02:38] it look like? When we start becoming, uh, our true selves, the, the agentic capacity to respond to the
[02:49] environment around us with the, uh, skill and, uh, acumen to be able to solve problems and approach with a
[02:59] novel solutions and create space for emergent opportunities and all of the kinds of things that,
[03:06] that the sort of Renaissance person's able to do, uh, what will happen is those moments themselves will
[03:15] take on a completely different character. They won't feel overwhelming. They won't feel like it's out of
[03:22] control. It will feel like this is just another thing. And that is one of the reasons why we build
[03:29] this capacity, uh, so that all of that sort of training and activity that we're doing to understand
[03:35] our own responses, to figure out how to best solve those problems, to not get in our own way when it
[03:40] comes to how we do that. Um, that all enables us to essentially, um, treat more and more extremes in
[03:49] terms of behavior, in terms of the situation, in terms of the sort of experience or the social
[03:54] construct, those extremes become essentially, uh, more tolerable for lack of a better way to say it
[04:01] in the overall, in your all everyday life. Right? So as you do this, you can tolerate and endure and
[04:12] thrive in, uh, a broader range of everyday life. That is really the cultivation of resilience.
[04:22] And so if you know somebody that, uh, flies off the handle at every little thing, this is a person
[04:31] who has not cultivated enough resilience to deal with the challenges of everyday life. If you find that
[04:39] you're that person, you're really setting yourself up for an opportunity to do the work.
[04:48] Uh, and we'll talk about over the next couple of episodes, how identifying those places where the
[04:56] extremes pull you off of your center or pull you out of, uh, uh, your ability to respond meaningfully,
[05:05] remarkably, you know, capably that kind of thing. Uh, that, that pull off of center is the beginning
[05:12] of finding something really important. And we'll talk about that in the next episode. See you then.