The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

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.

Taleb

If the heart yearns for fusion with another person or a cause, the soul yearns for righteousness, for fusion with the good. Socrates said that the purpose of life is the perfection of our souls—to realize the goodness that the soul longs for.

Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last….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?

The odd thing about the soul is that while it is powerful and resilient, it is also reclusive. You can go years without really feeling the force of its yearning.

And then there are moments, maybe more toward middle or old age, when the leopard comes down out of the hills and just sits there in the middle of your doorframe. 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.

The lesson is that the things we had thought were most important—achievement, affirmation, intelligence—are actually less important, and the things we had undervalued—heart and soul—are actually most important.

As I mentioned in the introduction, most of us make four big commitments over the course of our lives: to a vocation, to a spouse and family, to a philosophy or faith, and to a community.

All of them require a vow of dedication, an investment of time and effort, a willingness to close off other options,

There is something that feels almost involuntary about a deep commitment. It happens when some person or cause or field of research has become part of your very identity. You have reached the point of the double negative. “I can’t not do this.”

Somewhere along the way you realized, I’m a musician. I’m a Jew. I’m a scientist. I’m a Marine. I’m an American. I love her. I am his beloved.

A covenant is about identity.

A thick life is defined by commitments and obligations. The life well lived is a journey from open options to sweet compulsions.

they produce many benefits. Let me spell out a few: Our commitments give us our identity. They are how we introduce ourselves to strangers. They are the subjects that make our eyes shine in conversation.

each of us would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of his own lonely heart, caught in its ever-changing moods, contradictions, and equivocalities.”

That’s the paradox of privilege. When we are well-off we chase the temporary pleasures that actually draw us apart. We use our wealth to buy big houses with big yards that separate us and make us lonely. But in crisis we are compelled to hold closely to one another in ways that actually meet our deepest needs.

You have to chain yourself to a certain set of virtuous habits so you don’t become slave to your destructive desires—the desire for alcohol, the desire for approval, the desire to lie in bed all day.

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.

In my experience, people repress bad desires only when they are able to turn their attention to a better desire.

These people are somewheres, not anywheres, localists not cosmopolitans.

“Thinking gets you nowhere,” she wrote in her diary. “It may be a fine and noble aid in academic studies, but you can’t think your way out of emotional difficulties. That takes something altogether different. You have to make yourself passive then, and just listen. Re-establish contact with a slice of eternity.”

It is in these moments—and I am so grateful for them—that all personal ambition drops away from me, and that my thirst for knowledge and understanding comes to rest, and a small piece of eternity descends on me with a sweeping wingbeat.

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.

The core challenges of the second-mountain life are found in the questions, How do I choose my commitments? How do I decide what is the right commitment for me? How do I serve my commitments once they have been chosen? How do I blend my commitments so that together they merge into a coherent, focused, and joyful life?

or fiddling around with numbers

What is life asking of me?

What is my responsibility here?

Most days pass in an unmemorable flow,

A person entranced by wonder is pulled out of the normal voice-in-your-head self-absorption and finds herself awed by something greater than herself.

The Sublime

Recently I bought a Fitbit. It kept telling me that I was falling asleep between eight and eleven in the morning. But I wasn’t asleep; I was writing. Apparently writing is the time when my heartbeat is truly at rest; when I feel right with myself. THE

Nietzsche wrote that the way to discover what you were put on earth for is to go back into your past, list the times you felt most fulfilled, and then see if you can draw a line through them.

“Let the young soul survey its own life with a view to the following question: ‘What have you truly loved thus far?

The best thing about an annunciation moment is that it gives you an early hint of where your purpose lies. The next best thing is it rules out a bunch of other things. “Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him,” Walker Percy observes.

We want to be involved in some important pursuit that involves 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 the ones who were easy on us. They are the ones who balanced unstinting love with high standards and relentless demands on behalf of something they took seriously. We think we want ease and comfort, and of course we do from time to time, but there is something inside us that longs for some calling that requires dedication and sacrifice.

a lot of what mentors do is to teach us what excellence look...

They teach us how to humbly submit to the task. The natural tendency is to put oneself at the center of any activity. To ask, How am I doing? That question is fine to ask once. But it becomes paralyzing if you ask it all the time. A pitcher who is thinking about how he is pitching cannot pitch well.

When making the big choices in life, as L. A. Paul puts it, “You shouldn’t fool yourself—you have no idea what you are getting into.”

No wonder so many people have commitment phobia. No wonder some people are so paralyzed by the big choices that they just sort of sleepwalk through them.

Are you really going to bet your life on a momentary feeling? On an intuition?

I’m a middle-aged man and apparently I have no clue about who I really am.

But if you are trying to discern your vocation, the right question is not What am I good at? It’s the harder questions: What am I motivated to do? What activity do I love so much that I’m going to keep getting better at it for the next many decades? What do I desire so much that it captures me at the depth of my being?

Sometimes we lose touch with the daemon by adopting an excessively economic view of life.

If you really want to make a wise vocation decision, you have to lead the kind of life that keeps your heart and soul awake every day.

The people who make the wisest vocation decisions are the people who live their lives every day with their desires awake and alive.

“the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings.”

Eventually Christine abandoned engineering and became a pastry chef. “After an event like that, you think about your life and who you are and what you want to do.

“One’s mind has to be a searching mind,” Thomas Bernhard writes of the person looking for a calling. “A mind searching for mistakes, for the mistakes of humanity, a mind searching for failure.”

Simple questions help you locate your delight. What do I enjoy talking about? If it’s motorcycles, maybe your work is mechanics. When have I felt most needed? If it was protecting your country as a soldier, maybe your vocation is in law enforcement. What pains am I willing to tolerate? If you’re willing to tolerate the misery of rejection, you must have sufficient love of theater to go into acting. Or there’s Casey Gerald’s question: What would you do if you weren’t afraid? Fear is a pretty good GPS system; it tells you where you true desires are, even if they are on the far side of social disapproval.

Find that place in the self that is driven to connect with others, that spot where, as the novelist Frederick Buechner famously put it, your deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.

“A man’s never out of work if he’s worth a damn,” the old man reflected. “It’s just sometimes he doesn’t get paid. I’ve gone unpaid my share and I’ve pulled my share of pay. But that’s got nothing to do with working. A man’s work is doing what he’s supposed to do, and that’s why he needs a catastrophe now and again to show him a bad turn isn’t the end, because a bad stroke never stops a good man’s work.” That’s

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