The Second Mountain

Our commitments allow us to move to a higher level of freedom.

Our commitments build our moral character.

Our commitments give us a sense of purpose.

If the first mountain is about building up the ego and defining the self, the second mountain is about shedding the ego and losing the self.

A commitment is falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters.

Character is a good thing to have, and there’s a lot to be learned on the road to character. But there’s a better thing to have—moral joy. And that serenity arrives as you come closer to embodying perfect love.

The fulfillment of our lives depends on how well we choose and live out those sometimes clashing commitments.

I now think good character is a by-product of giving yourself away. You love things that are worthy of love. You surrender to a community or cause, make promises to other people, build a thick jungle of loving attachments, lose yourself in the daily act of serving others as they lose themselves in the daily acts of serving you.

Living a good life requires a much vaster transformation. It’s not enough to work on your own weaknesses. The whole cultural paradigm has to shift from the mindset of hyper-individualism to the relational mindset of the second mountain.

My core point is that happiness is good, but joy is better. Just as the second mountain is a fuller and richer phase of life after the first mountain, joy is a fuller and richer state beyond happiness.

Some people live joyfully day by day. Their daily actions are aligned with their ultimate commitments. They have given themselves away, united and wholeheartedly.

A telos crisis is defined by the fact that people in it don’t know what their purpose is. When this happens, they become fragile.

The whole cultural paradigm has to shift from the mindset of hyper-individualism to the relational mindset of the second mountain.

The more you are living a committed life well, the more joy will be your steady state, the frame of mind you carry around with you and shine on others. You will become a joyful person.

The people who radiate a permanent joy have given themselves over to lives of deep and loving commitment. Giving has become their nature, and little by little they have made their souls incandescent.

Happiness can be tasted alone. But permanent joy comes out of an enmeshed and embedded life. Happiness happens when a personal desire is fulfilled. Permanent moral joy seems to emerge when desire is turned outward for others.

You have to lose yourself to find yourself, give yourself away to get everything back.

Joy is not a self-standing emotion, it is the crown of a well-lived life. Joy is the emotional dimension of life that goes well and that is led well.

Once the dominant ethos was about doing your duty, but now life was about doing your own thing. Where once the group had come first, now the individual came first.

But when individualism becomes the absolutely dominant ethos of a civilization—when it is not counterbalanced with any competing ethos—then the individuals within it may have maximum freedom, but the links between the individuals slowly begin to dissolve.

In a culture of “I’m Free to Be Myself,” individuals are lonely and loosely attached. Community is attenuated, connections are dissolved, and loneliness spreads.

Freedom sucks. Political freedom is great. But personal, social, and emotional freedom—when it becomes an ultimate end—absolutely sucks. It leads to a random, busy life with no discernible direction, no firm foundation.

The ultimate heart’s desire—the love behind all the other loves—is the desire to lose yourself in something or someone.

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.

There is some piece of your consciousness that has no shape, size, weight, or color. This is the piece of you that is of infinite value and dignity.

The soul is the seedbed of your moral consciousness and your ethical sense.

A commitment is a promise made from love. A commitment is making a promise to something without expecting a return—out of sheer lovingness.

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.

We have become too cognitive when we should be more emotional; too utilitarian when we should be using a moral lens; too individualistic when we should be more communal.

If you don’t know what your life is for, how does it help to be told that your future is limitless? That just ups the pressure.

Connection happens at the nexus of truth and love. Truth without love is harshness. Love without truth is sentimentality. But if you can be completely honest with somebody in the context of loving support, then you have a trusting relationship.

Community builders believe in radical mutuality. They utterly reject the notion that some people have everything in order, and others are screwups. In their view, we are all stumblers.

As W. H. Auden put it, the task in life is to 'love your crooked neighbor with all your crooked heart.

Community builders talk about the need to take a whole-person approach. When a child enters school, she doesn’t leave behind her healthcare issues, her safety issues, her emotional traumas, her nutritional needs, her need for purpose and meaning.

The thing everybody knows about finding a vocation is that it’s quite different from finding a career.

The sense of calling comes from the question, What is my responsibility here?

The summons to vocation is a very holy thing. It feels mystical, like a call from deep to deep.

To feel wonder in the face of beauty is to be grandly astonished. 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 crucial terrain to be explored in any vocation search is the terrain of your heart and soul, your long-term motivation. Knowledge is plentiful; motivation is scarce.

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

Sometimes it’s tragedy that shocks us out of false desires and helps us see our real ones.

Vocation can be a cure for self-centeredness, because to do the work well you have to pay attention to the task itself.

Just as all writing is really rewriting, all commitment is really recommitment. It’s saying yes to the thing you’ve already said yes to.

Marriage comes as a revolution. To have lived as a one and then suddenly become a two—that is an invasion. And yet there is a prize. People in long, happy marriages have won the lottery of life.

Marriage is knowing she likes to get to the airport early. Marriage is taking the time to make the bed even though you know that if you didn’t do it she probably would.

At the end of the day there is the brutal grinding effort of surrendering the ego to the altar of marriage, giving up part of yourself, the desires you have, for the larger union.

Who you marry is the most important decision you will ever make. Marriage colors your life and everything in it.

We’ve all met couples like that, who have come to look alike, smile alike. I know a couple, Jim and Deb Fallows, who are famous in our circle for having the happiest marriage.

Marriage is the sort of thing where it’s safer to go all in, and it’s dangerous to go in half-hearted. At the far end, when done well, you see people enjoying the deepest steady joy you can find on this earth.

Love starts as a focusing of attention. The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.

Intimacy happens when somebody shares something emotionally meaningful, and the other person receives it and shares back.

Your personality is the hidden history of the places where love entered your life or was withdrawn from your life.

Love is possible only if two people eventually reveal the center of their existences.

People are judged as much by their listening as by what they say, because when you think you are passively listening to others, you are actually teaching them about yourself.

Love plows open the hard crust of our personality and exposes the fertile soil below. Love decenters the self. It teaches us that our riches are in another.

Love can produce the most prodigious deeds in the most immediate way, without guidance by principle or command of duty. The lover knows the value of beauty and also knows that he cannot live well, or perhaps at all, alone.

Marriage is a fifty-year conversation. The most important factor in when you think about marrying someone is, Would I enjoy talking with this person for the rest of my life?

When you are making a marital commitment, you are making a vow, a promise. So another crucial question is, Does this person keep his or her promises?

Marriage starts as a joy and ends up an education. It starts as a joy because at first you get to spend every day with the person you care about most in the world, the one who makes you happiest just to be around. But then it turns into something else.

Marital love is a seeing love. Happy marriages are based on a deep friendship. By this I mean mutual respect for and enjoyment of each other’s company.

Marriage, like all commitments, isn’t there to make you happy; it is there to make you grow.

Recommitment often means putting your own sins on the table. Forbearance means acknowledging the wrongs that have been committed, and even the anger that they have created, but it puts anger in the context of love.

It is an immemorial law of human nature that behavior change precedes and causes attitudinal change. If you behave kindly toward a person, you will become kind and you will cherish them.

Trust the person you married. Let the other person help you. Trust them to know what’s right. Be loyal.

Second love is the kind of love people have for each other after they’ve seen each other at their worst, after they’ve forgiven a few times and been forgiven, after they can take some pride in having survived together and some comfort in the knowledge that they will survive.

The universities, like the rest of society, are information rich and meaning poor.

Religion is not made of these moments; religion is the means of making these moments part of your life rather than merely radical intrusions so foreign and perhaps even fearsome that you can’t even acknowledge their existence afterward.

We are alive in the natural world, and we use science to understand that layer of aliveness. We are also alive in another dimension, the dimension of spirit and meaning. We use the biblical stories to understand that dimension of aliveness.

If there are no overarching stories, then life is meaningless. Life does not feel meaningless. These stories provide, in their simple yet endlessly complex ways, a living script.

We are commanded to co-create the world. We are commanded to finish what God has begun. Our common salvation comes through works and good deeds.

The Christian way is the little way—small acts of radical kindness done with great love.

In my world, you take possession of your life, exercising agency. But in the Christian one, you are not even the owner of yourself. Your talents merely flow through you; you give yourself to the one who made you.

Religion doesn’t produce as many truly good people, like Wes, as you’d think it would. Religious people talk so much about holiness and goodness and love, you’d think they would be more virtuous than atheists and agnostics.

The Jew does not experience faith primarily in solitude. He or she experiences it primarily in community, in what one does with others. The synagogue is not the locus of Jewish life. The Shabbat dinner table is.

Moments of spiritual transcendence came to me as mesmerizing beauty.

The line between good and evil passes not between tribes or nations but straight through every human heart.

Some people get to the top of that first mountain, taste success, and find it…unsatisfying. 'Is this all there is?' they wonder.

A commitment is making a promise to something without expecting a reward. A commitment is falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters.

Happiness is what we aim for on the first mountain. Joy is a by-product of living on the second mountain.

The meritocracy’s soul-flattening influence is survivable if you have your own competing moral system that exists in you alongside it, but if you have no competing value system, the meritocracy swallows you whole.

Suffering teaches us gratitude. Normally we take love and friendship for granted. But in seasons of suffering, we throw ourselves on others and appreciate the gifts that our loved ones offer.

Individualism says, Shoot for personal happiness, but the person on the second mountain says, No, I shoot for meaning and moral joy.

The quality of the conversation is the quality of the marriage.

Marriage is a fifty-year conversation.

The object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.

Life is not a solitary journey. It is building a home together.

Rebuilding community involves seeing that the neighborhood, not the individual, is the essential unit of social change.

Freedom sucks. Political freedom is great. But personal, social, and emotional freedom—when it becomes an ultimate end—absolutely sucks.

The emphasis on self—individual success, self- fulfillment, individual freedom, self-actualization—is a catastrophe. I now think that living a good life requires a much vaster transformation.

It is a paradox that when people are finding themselves they often have a sensation that they are letting go and surrendering themselves. You stop asking, What do I want? and start asking, What is life asking of me? You respond.

We’re here to remind ourselves of values that unite us and commitments that keep us heading in the right direction. We’re here to choose again what we chose before.

Seeing well is not natural. It is an act of humility. It means getting your own self—your own needs and wishes—out of the way, so that you can see the thing you’re looking at as itself, and not just as a mirror of your own interests.