THE DAUNTING TASK OF ORGANIZING THINKING

Once, long before you and me were born, ideas were being exchanged somewhere, somehow. Ideology grew when new ideas made people restless. Searching for the easy path was the way most learned to resolve their conflicts. Simple. Simple until ideas were dissected and shown to have complexity.  The spread of ideas did not and still does not happen uniformly. Whereever we are, we are at the ragged edge of learning. Testing our resolve is the surge of the radically new. We could call it resistence, but that would ignore the way people absorb innovation by digesting and adapting. Always, innovation is welcomed by some, resisted by others, coming on as a growing storm of change. From the first waivering chill, to winds that scream and darkness that consumes lightness, the experience is even individual.  I remember well, that there was a man who ran for and failed to gain election to the highest political office in our land, who humans walked with dinosaurs. It frighened me, that this was a man who spoke for a section of the nation ready to argue speciously the merit of belief over fact.  Until those thoughtful men leaned into conversation around their small table, to relax, to reason and confidently explore their disagreements what later became a movement was shifting colliding like tectonic plates underfoot, unseen and always floating.  Reason broke through but did not remove barriers of tribalism show us a new realty, of dream fulfilment, ridding mankind of tensions by shifting attitudes and growing confidence. Entrance to those tables required intelligence to share evidence, physical and metaphysical.  And as they did, we did.   Freemasonry offered an accommodation not replacement; a means to navigate superstition and manipulation; a way to think about invention and change with the goal of something called happiness. Irreligious to pious, respectful of questions that we put to ourselves about purpose and meaning.