Why aren't you a mason?

The connection between self-development and masonry is obscure.  Yet for over 700 years, people have gathered in various configurations to work through ideas by debate.  Perhaps Hegel was not as prescience we want to believe. Perhaps defining ideas through debate as he said,  came to him through a leaked comment about early lodge meetings? To this day, the layered insights of thousands of masons make it difficult to lay claim to this grail quest of existence. Doing slightly better tomorrow than today. It is a modest claim but contains the same confident gradualism most achievers well understand.  Most things worth pursuing require commitment. Commitment requires patience.  Patience requires self-awareness. Wealth and fame do not instill happiness. Happiness is an internal process so what we do externally does not produce the fountain of youth. One must actively seek it, every day, every hour, every minute. Masonry has done. Let us not pretend modern science is the start of every idea. The ancient Greeks scuttled that idea in 5th century BC, as an enriched ground of ideas that gave out notice of heliocentrism and molecules and many other observations well before the latter-day "discoverers" rediscovered them centuries later. As such, doing things selflessly produces a deep sense of satisfaction. Recognition for assistance and aid is unnecessary to achieve nirvana. And that lesson has been an open lesson of Freemasonry, open as if any secret can be hidden if one is a student of behaviour. What a person does, reveals far more about them than anything they might say.  Audi Vide Tace, si vis vivere in pace.  Hear, see, be silent if you would live in peace.  

What I enjoy most about masonry and something I think is often misunderstood about the Craft, is that it isn't as some would make you believe, institutional but fluid.