The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

once we’ve filed something away with a judgment—even our very selves—we stop seeing it in all its complexity.

The wilderness teaches negative capability, the ability to rest in uncertainty, to not jump to premature conclusions.

“When I venture into wilderness, I’m surprised by how much I enjoy my own company,” Belden Lane writes. “The person I travel with there isn’t worried about his performance. He sheds the polished persona he tries so often to project to others. Scribbling in my journal under the shade of a pin oak atop Bell Mountain, I’m happy as a lark. I want to be the person that I am when I’m alone in wilderness.” This is the beginning of an important revelation.

This is the pivotal point, maybe of this whole book. On the surface of our lives most of us build the hard shell. It is built to cover fear and insecurity and win approval and success. When you get down to the core of yourself, you find a different, more primeval country, and in it a deep yearning to care and connect.

The ego wants you to point your life to the role that will make you seem smart, good-looking, and admirable. It’s likely you have spent a lot of time so far conforming to the ego ideal.

The passions are not the opposite of reason; they are the foundation of reason and often contain a wisdom the analytic brain can’t reach. The ultimate heart’s desire—the love behind all the other loves—is the desire to lose yourself in something or someone.

The soul is the seedbed of your moral consciousness and your ethical sense. As C. S. Lewis observed, there’s never been a country where people are admired for running away in battle, or for double-crossing people who were kind to them. We seem to be oriented by these moral sentiments the way other animals are oriented by the magnetic field.

A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?

You are enjoying the pleasures of life, building your career. It’s amazing how untroubled you can be, year after year, while your soul is out there somewhere far away. But eventually it hunts you down. In this way the soul is like a reclusive leopard living high up in the mountain forest somewhere. You may forget about him for long stretches. You are busy with the normal mundane activities of life, and the leopard is up in the mountains. But from time to time out of the corner of your eye,

when your thoughts come, as one poet puts it, like a drawer full of knives. There’s trouble in your soul, and it keeps you awake.

He stares at you, inescapably. He demands your justification. What good have you served? For what did you come? What sort of person have you become? There are no excuses at that moment. Everybody has to throw off the mask.

You learn you are not just a brain and a set of talents to impress the world, but a heart and soul—primarily heart and soul. Now everything you do for the rest of your life is likely to be testimony to that reality.

really was a shallow and selfish jerk until I went on that amazing vacation in Hawaii.” No, people usually talk about moments of difficulty,

everything I have learned in my 75 years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained.”

People develop this ego self so they can perform the tasks of the first mountain: to bull your way into the world, get a job, make your mark, build an identity. But there is a deeper self underneath that can’t be seen unless the ego self falls

When you go down inside yourself, you find that there are longings in there that are only completed when you are loving and serving others.

relinquishment of the ego self and emergence of the heart and soul has happened, people are ready to begin the second mountain.

You don’t have to impress the world. You’ve got the skill you earned on the first mountain and the wisdom you earned in the valley, and now is the time to take the big risk. “The sowing is behind; now is the time to reap,”

We have a season when we chase the shallow things in life. We are not fulfilled. Then comes hardship, which exposes the heart and soul.

silent rebellion against the “I’m Free to Be Myself” culture that is still the defining feature of our age. That individualistic culture, you’ll remember, was itself a rebellion against the stifling conformity of the 1950s. The second-mountain ethos is a rebellion against that rebellion.

I will celebrate the chance to become dependent on those I care for and for them to become dependent on me. Individualism celebrates autonomy; the second mountain celebrates relation.

focuses on self-interest doesn’t account for the full amplitude of the human person. We are capable of great acts of love that self-interest cannot fathom, and murderous acts of cruelty that self-interest cannot explain.

You have to be loved first so you can understand love, and you have to see yourself actively loving others so that you know you are worthy of love.

The second mountain is a vale of promise making. It is about making commitments, tying oneself down, and giving oneself away. It is about surrendering the self

willingness to close off other options, and the daring to leap headlong down a ski run

a commitment is different from a contract. A person making a contract is weighing pros and cons. A person entering into a contract doesn’t really change. She just finds some arrangement that will suit her current interests. A commitment, on the other hand, changes who you are, or rather embeds who you are into a new relationship.

“A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship.

Spiritual people may experience transcendence, but understand that for most people spirituality lasts and deepens only if it is lived out within that maddening community called institutionalized religion.

“Spirituality is an emotion. Religion is an obligation. Spirituality soothes. Religion mobilizes. Spirituality is satisfied with itself. Religion is dissatisfied with the world.”

But in crisis we are compelled to hold closely to one another in ways that actually meet our deepest needs. Our commitments allow

“is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones.” So much of our lives are determined by the definition of freedom we carry around unconsciously in our heads. On the second mountain it is your chains that set you free.

commitment, the distinction between altruism and selfishness begins to fade away. When you serve your child it feels like you are serving a piece of yourself. That disposition to do good is what having good character is all about.

“This is not a job I’ll retire from,” says Sharon Murphy, who runs Mary House, a refugee-housing organization in Washington. “I love what I do. This kind of work is a way of being.”

Once people decided that human nature is essentially egoist and selfish, then it was necessary to invent a word for when people weren’t driven by selfish desires.

But before that, what we call altruism—living for relationships—was just how people lived. It wasn’t heroic or special.

walkout experience.

They tend to be hedgehogs, not foxes. In the famous formulation, the fox knows many things and can see the world with an opposable mind, from many points of view. But the hedgehog knows one thing, has one big idea around which his or her life revolves. This is the mentality that committed

At this point you just let go of the wheel. You stop asking, What do I want? and start asking, What is life asking of me? You respond.

you have to stay in the conversation long enough; you have to listen patiently enough. Community builders believe in radical mutuality. They utterly reject the notion that some people have everything in order, and others are screwups.

Their eyes communicate the residue of solitary battles with angels, the costs of caring for others, the deaths of ambition and ego, and the peace that comes from having very little left to lose in this life.

glimpse of what the shift from egocentric immaturity to selfless maturity looks like from the inside.

One task in life is synthesis. It is to collect all the fragmented pieces of a self and bring them to a state of unity, so that you move coherently toward a single vision.

not through an endless inner process of self-excavation. It was through an outer process of giving her whole self away.

“to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.”

When you have a career mentality, the frontal cortex is very much in charge. You take an inventory of your talents. What are you good at? What talent has value in the marketplace?

Some activity or some injustice has called to the deepest level of your nature and demanded an active response. Carl Jung called a vocation “an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths….Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: He is called.”

the career questions—What do I want from life? What can I do to make myself happy?—are not the proper questions. The real question is, What is life asking of me?

destiny.

hardship and is worthy of that hardship. The mentors who really lodge in the mind are the ones who were hard on us—or at least were hard on themselves and set the right example—not

of course we do from time to time, but there is something inside us that longs for some calling that requires dedication and sacrifice.