The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

David Brooks

*This is one of the best most impactful books I’ve ever read

Also checkout David’s exceptional book The Road to Character 

INTRODUCTION 

Every once in a while, I meet a person who radiates joy. These are people who seem to glow with an inner light. They are kind, tranquil, delighted by small pleasures, and grateful for the large ones. These people are not perfect. They get exhausted and stressed. They make errors in judgment. But they live for others, and not for themselves. They’ve made unshakable commitments to family, a cause, a community, or a faith. They know why they were put on this earth and derive a deep satisfaction from doing what they have been called to do.

Life isn’t easy for these people. They’ve taken on the burdens of others. But they have a serenity about them, a settled resolve. They are interested in you, make you feel cherished and known, and take delight in your good. When you meet these people, you realize that joy is not just a feeling, it can be an outlook. There are temporary highs we all get after we win some victory, and then there is also this other kind of permanent joy that animates people who are not obsessed with themselves but have given themselves away.

Life, for these people, has often followed what we might think of as a two-mountain shape. They got out of school, they start a career, and they begin climbing the mountain they thought they were meant to climb. Their goals on this first mountain are the ones our culture endorses: to be a success, to make your mark, to experience personal happiness. But when they get to the top of that mountain, something happens. They look around and find the view . . . unsatisfying. They realize: This isn’t my mountain after all. There’s another, bigger mountain out there that is actually my mountain. And so they embark on a new journey. On the second mountain, life moves from self-centered to other-centered. They want the things that are truly worth wanting, not the things other people tell them to want. They embrace a life of interdependence, not independence. They surrender to a life of commitment.

FIRST MOUNTAIN

• On the first mountain, we all have to perform certain life tasks: establish an identity, separate from our parents, cultivate our talents, build a secure ego, and try to make a mark in the world. People climbing that first mountain spend a lot of time thinking about reputation management. They are always keeping score. How do I measure up? Where do I rank? As the psychologist James Hollis puts it, at that stage we have a tendency to think, I am what the world says I am.
• Then something happens. Some people get to the top of that first mountain, taste success, and find it…unsatisfying. “Is this all there is?” they wonder. They sense there must be a deeper journey they can take. Other people get knocked off that mountain by some failure. 
• But for others, this valley is the making of them. The season of suffering interrupts the superficial flow of everyday life. They see deeper into themselves and realize that down in the substrate, flowing from all the tender places, there is a fundamental ability to care, a yearning to transcend the self and care for others.
• And when they have encountered this yearning, they are ready to become a whole person. They see familiar things with new eyes. They are finally able to love their neighbor as themselves, not as a slogan but a practical reality. Their life is defined by how they react to their moment of greatest adversity.
• But suddenly they are not interested in what other people tell them to want. They want to want the things that are truly worth wanting. They elevate their desires. The world tells them to be a good consumer, but they want to be the one consumed—by a moral cause. The world tells them to want independence, but they want interdependence—to be enmeshed in a web of warm relationships. The world tells them to want individual freedom, but they want intimacy, responsibility, and commitment.
• The people who have been made larger by suffering are brave enough to let parts of their old self die. Down in the valley, their motivations changed. They’ve gone from self-centered to other-centered.

That’s the crucial way to tell whether you are on your first or second mountain. Where is your ultimate appeal? To self, or to something outside of self?

THE SECOND MOUNTAIN

• You don’t climb the second mountain the way you climb the first mountain. You conquer your first mountain. You identify the summit, and you claw your way toward it. You are conquered by your second mountain. You surrender to some summons, and you do everything necessary to answer the call and address the problem or injustice that is in front of you. On the first mountain you tend to be ambitious, strategic, and independent. On the second mountain you tend to be relational, intimate, and relentless.
• They have decided that, as C. S. Lewis put it, “The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.”
• People on the second mountain have made strong commitments to one or all of these four things: 
  • A vocation A spouse and family 
  • A philosophy or faith 
  • A community 
  • 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.

• 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. 
• 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.
• But when I look back generally on the errors and failures and sins of my life, they tend to be failures of omission, failures to truly show up for the people I should have been close to. They tend to be the sins of withdrawal: evasion, workaholism, conflict avoidance, failure to empathize, and a failure to express myself openly.
• “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us,” Kafka wrote. It should wake us up and hammer at our skull.
• Our society has become a conspiracy against joy. It has put too much emphasis on the individuating part of our consciousness—individual reason—and too little emphasis on the bonding parts of our consciousness, the heart and soul. We’ve seen a shocking rise of mental illness, suicide, and distrust. 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.
• The good news is that what we give to our community in pennies, our communities give back to us in dollars. If there is one thing I have learned over the past five years, it is that the world is more enchanted, stranger, more mystical, and more interconnected than anything we could have envisioned when we were on the first mountain.
• Dorothy Day captured it beautifully: “If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure, I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms….No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship, to adore.”
• I experienced a sort of liquid joy and overflowing gratitude that seemed to stop time, that made my heart swell. I’m sure all parents have experienced something like this.
• I once was seated with the Dalai Lama at a lunch in Washington. He didn’t say anything particularly illuminating or profound during the lunch, but every once in a while he just burst out laughing for no apparent reason…..Ebullience is his resting state.
• Your essence is changeable, like your mind. Every action you take, every thought you have, changes you, even if just a little, making you a little more elevated or a little more degraded. If you do a series of good deeds, the habit of other-centeredness becomes gradually engraved into your life. It becomes easier to do good deeds down the line. If you lie or behave callously or cruelly toward someone, your personality degrades, and it is easier for you to do something even worse later on.

“There is joy in self-forgetfulness,” Helen Keller observed. “So I try to make the light in others’ eyes my sun, the music in others’ ears my symphony, the smile on others’ lips my happiness.”

• Joy tends to be self-transcending. Happiness is something you pursue; joy is something that rises up unexpectedly and sweeps over you. Happiness comes from accomplishments; joy comes from offering gifts. Happiness fades; we get used to the things that used to make us happy. Joy doesn’t fade.
• As Joseph Campbell put it in an interview with Bill Moyers, there are two types of deed. There is the physical deed: the hero who performs an act of bravery in war and saves a village. But there is also the spiritual hero, who has found a new and better way of experiencing spiritual life, and then comes back and communicates it to everyone else. Or, in Iris Murdoch’s words: “Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture.”
• The God within.The goal of life is to climb Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and achieve self-actualization and self-fulfillment. As you make your own personal journey, you learn to better express your own unique self. You learn to get in touch with yourself, find yourself, and live in a way that is authentic to who you really are. The ultimate source of authority is found inside, in listening to the authentic voice of the Hidden Oracle within, in staying true to your feelings and by not conforming to the standards of the corrupt society outside.
• They lived in a spiritual culture that saw all creation as a single unity. The Europeans had an individualistic culture and were more separable. When actually given the choice, a lot of people preferred community over self.
• The right thing to do when you are in moments of suffering is to stand erect in the suffering. Wait. See what it has to teach you. Understand that your suffering is a task that, if handled correctly, with the help of others, will lead to enlargement, not diminishment.
• The valley is where we shed the old self so the new self can emerge. There are no shortcuts. There’s just the same eternal three-step process that the poets have described from time eternal: from suffering to wisdom to service.

WILDERNESS

• At the moment when you are most confused about what you should do with your life, the smartest bet is to do what millions of men and women have done through history. Pick yourself up and go out alone into the wilderness.
• In the wilderness, life is stripped of distractions. It is quiet. The topography demands discipline, simplicity, and fierce attention. Solitude in the wilderness makes irrelevant all the people-pleasing habits that have become interwoven into your personality.
• “What happens when a ‘gifted child’ finds himself in a wilderness where he’s stripped of any way of proving his worth?” asks Belden Lane in Backpacking with the Saints. “What does he do when there’s nothing he can do, when there’s no audience to applaud his performance, when he faces a cold, silent indifference, if not hostility? His world falls to pieces. The soul hungry for approval starves in a desert like that. It reduces the compulsive achiever to something little, utterly ordinary. Only then is he able to be loved.”
• But the wilderness marks time in eons; nothing changes quickly. The wilderness lives at the pace of what the Greeks called kairos time, which can be slower but is always richer. Synchronous time is moment after moment, but kairos time is qualitative, opportune or not yet ripe, rich or spare, inspired or flat—the crowded hour or the empty moment. When you have been away in the wilderness for weeks, you begin to move at kairos time. The soul communing with itself in the wilderness is at kairos time, too—slow and serene, but thick and strong, like the growing of the redwood.

As long as your wounded part remains foreign to your adult self, your pain will injure you as well as others.” As the saying goes, suffering that is not transformed is transmitted.

• Listen to your life,” Frederick Buechner wrote. “See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”

VOCATION

• You don’t find your vocation through an act of taking charge. “Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about—quite apart from what I would like it to be about.”
• The ego, says Lee Hardy, wants you to choose a job and a life that you can use as a magic wand to impress others. It’s at this deep level that you sense a different life, one your ego cannot even fathom. There’s something in you that senses, as C. S. Lewis wrote, “the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
• We’re at the first stage of renunciation—shedding the old self so the new self can emerge. It’s at this point you realize you are a much better person than your ego ideal. It’s at this point when you really discover the heart and soul.

SIX Heart and Soul

“To be human is to be on the move, pursuing something, after something. We are like existential sharks: we have to move to live.” There is some deep part of ourselves from where desires flow. We’re defined by what we desire, not what we know.

• The ultimate heart’s desire—the love behind all the other loves—is the desire to lose yourself in something or someone. Think about it: Almost every movie you’ve ever seen is about somebody experiencing this intense sense of merging with something, giving themselves 
• The ultimate desire is the desire for fusion with a beloved other, for an I–Thou bond, the wholehearted surrender of the whole being, the pure union, the intimacy beyond fear.
• “Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.” This is the heart fulfilled.

THE SOUL

• But I do ask you to believe that you have a soul. 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 dignity of this piece doesn’t increase or decrease with age; it doesn’t get bigger or smaller depending on your size and strength.
• “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within,” Immanuel Kant wrote.
• The leopard can visit during one of those fantastic moments with friends or family—when you look out at the laughing faces of your own children across a picnic table on some perfect summer day, and you are overwhelmed by gratitude. In those moments, you feel called to be worthy of such undeserved happiness, and the soul sort of swells with joy.
• 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.

A FORTUNATE FALL 

• In the valley, if you are fortunate, you learn to see yourself as a whole person. 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.
• When you ask people what experience made them the person they are, they never say, “I really was a shallow and selfish jerk until I went on that amazing vacation in Hawaii.” No, people usually talk about moments of difficulty, struggle.
• “I can say with complete truthfulness that 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.”
• After the old self is relinquished, the heart and soul have space to take control. Old desires are shed and bigger desires are formed. The movement, clinical psychologist Daphne de Marneffe writes, is “deepening inward and expanding outward.”
• 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. “And then,” says the poet Rilke, “the knowledge comes to me that I have space within me for a second, timeless, larger life.”
• When this relinquishment of the ego self and emergence of the heart and soul has happened, people are ready to begin the second mountain. Except they don’t describe it as another climb. They describe it, often enough, as a fall. They have let go of something, and they are falling through themselves.

SEVEN The Committed Life

• On the first mountain, a person makes individual choices and keeps their options open. 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.
• a couple is actually in love, and you pull them aside and tell them that this love probably doesn’t make sense and they should forsake it, you will almost certainly not persuade them. They’d rather be in turmoil with each other than in tranquility alone.
• You have reached the point of the double negative. “I can’t not do this.”
• Thus, the most complete definition of a commitment is this: falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters.
• When I had my first child, a friend emailed me, “Welcome to the world of unavoidable reality.”
• Our commitments give us a sense of purpose. In 2007, the Gallup organization asked people around the world whether they felt they were leading meaningful lives. It turns out that Liberia was the country where the most people felt a sense of meaning and purpose, while the Netherlands was the place where the lowest percentage of people did. This is not because life was necessarily sweeter in Liberia. On the contrary. But Liberians possessed what Paul Froese calls “existential urgency.”
  • In the turmoil of their lives, they were compelled to make fierce commitments to one another merely to survive. They were willing to risk their lives for one another. And these fierce commitments gave their lives a sense of meaning. 
  • 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.

• Our commitments allow us to move to a higher level of freedom. In our culture we think of freedom as the absence of restraint. That’s freedom from. But there is another and higher kind of freedom. That is freedom to. This is the freedom as fullness of capacity, and it often involves restriction and restraint.
  • You have to chain yourself to the piano and practice for year after year if you want to have the freedom to really play. 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.
  • As the theologian Tim Keller puts it, real freedom “is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones.”

• When a parent falls in love with a child, the love arouses amazing energy levels; we lose sleep caring for the infant. The love impels us to make vows to the thing we love; parents vow to always be there for their kid. Fulfilling those vows requires us to perform specific self-sacrificial practices; we push the baby in a stroller when maybe we’d rather go out alone for a run. Over time those practices become habits, and those habits engrave a certain disposition; by the time the kid is three, the habit of putting the child’s needs first has become second nature to most parents.

Character emerges from our commitments. If you want to inculcate character in someone else, teach them how to form commitments—temporary ones in childhood, provisional ones in youth, permanent ones in adulthood. Commitments are the school for moral formation.

EIGHT 

The Second Mountain

I brought my daughter one day and as she walked out she told me, “That’s the warmest place I’ve ever been in my life.”

• But the dinner table is the key technology of social intimacy here. It is the tool we use to bond, connect, and commit to one another. I’ve learned to never underestimate the power of a dinner table. It’s the stage on which we turn toward one another for love like flowers seeking the sun. “Thank you for seeing the light in me,” one young woman said to Kathy one night.
• In his book A Hidden Wholeness, Parker Palmer writes about the two ways in which our hearts can be broken: the first imagining the heart as shattered and scattered; the second imagining the heart broken open into new capacity, holding more of both our own and the world’s suffering and joy, despair and hope. The image of the heart broken open has become the driving force of my life in the years since my wife’s death. It has become the purpose to my life.

Community Builders 

• These people are somewheres, not anywheres, localists not cosmopolitans. They are attached to a particular place, a spot of ground.
• 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 community weavers tend to have.
• They assume responsibility. Somebody in their background planted an ideal of what a responsible life looks like, of what you are supposed to do. Some people walk down the street and see passing forms. But these community builders see persons and their needs.
• They often use the phrase “radical hospitality” to describe their philosophy of life, because their goal is that nobody should ever be shut out from their welcome.
• Relationship is the driver of change. Think of who made you who you are. It was probably a parent, a teacher, or a mentor. It wasn’t some organization that was seeking a specific and measurable outcome that can be reduced to metrics.
• A lot of what they do is to create spaces where deep conversations can happen.
• As W. H. Auden put it, the task in life is to “love your crooked neighbor with all your crooked heart.”

The Four Commitments PART II Vocation 

NINE What Vocation Looks Like

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.”

• • He realized that 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?

• “It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us,” he realized. “We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which life constantly sets for each individual.”
• The sense of calling comes from the question, What is my responsibility here?
• Vocations invariably have testing periods—periods when the costs outweigh the benefits—which a person must go through to reach another level of intensity. At these moments, if you were driven by a career mentality you would quit. You’re putting more into this thing than you are getting out. But a person who has found a vocation doesn’t feel she has a choice. It would be a violation of her own nature. So she pushes through when it doesn’t seem to make sense.
• Often people feel a call but don’t really understand it, or they forget the call or just wander off. It’s only later that they make up a neat linear narrative of their life to describe how they took the road less traveled.
• He found himself greeted by a morning “more glorious than I had ever beheld.” The sea, he wrote, seemed to be laughing in the distance. The mountains were bright as clouds. All of creation was pure delight: Wordsworth, in other words, had to endure a period of drift while waiting to settle into his groove in life, the way most of us do.
• Wordsworth’s life came into focus only after two strokes of good fortune he couldn’t have imagined beforehand. A casual acquaintance of his named Raisley Calvert saw a spark of genius in him, when almost no one else did.
• The summons to vocation is a very holy thing. It feels mystical, like a call from deep to deep. But then the messy way it happens in actual lives doesn’t feel holy at all; just confusing and screwed up.
• “A child comes to the edge of deep water with a mind prepared for wonder,” Wilson observed decades later in Naturalist, his memoir. “Hands-on experience at the critical time, not systematic knowledge, is what counts in the making of a naturalist….Better to spend long stretches of time just searching and dreaming.”
• The other interesting thing about annunciation moments is how aesthetic they are. Often, they happen when a child finds something that just seems sublime. They are going about their life in its normal course, and then suddenly beauty strikes. Some sight or experience renders them dumb with wonder—a stingray gliding beneath one’s feet.
• 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. There’s a feeling of radical openness, curiosity, and reverence. There’s an instant freshness of perception, a desire to approach and affiliate.
• “Some of our most wonderful memories are beautiful places where we felt immediately at home,” John O’Donohue writes.
• The Greek word for “beauty” was kalon, which is related to the word for “call.” Beauty incites a desire to explore something and live within it. Children put posters of their obsessions on the wall. They draw images of them in art class and on the covers of their notebooks. “I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart,” Vincent van Gogh wrote, in the middle of a life obsessed with beauty.
• Einstein wrote. “The scientist’s religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law.”
• 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.
• In his essay “Schopenhauer as Educator,” 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.
• He writes, “Let the young soul survey its own life with a view to the following question: 
  • ‘What have you truly loved thus far? 
  • What has ever uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted it at the same time?’ 
  • Assemble these revered objects in a row before you and perhaps they will reveal a law by their nature and their order: the fundamental law of your very self.”

• In fact, the tricky part of an annunciation moment is not having it, but realizing you’re having it. The world is full of beautiful things and moments of wonder. But sometimes they pass by without us realizing their importance. Often, we’re not aware of our annunciation moments except in retrospect. You look back and realize, “Okay, that’s when this all started….That was the freakishly unlikely circumstance that set things off on this wonderful course.”

ELEVEN What Mentors Do

• Good mentors coach you through the various decisions of life, such as where to go to graduate school or what jobs to take. Good mentors teach you the tacit wisdom embedded in any craft.
• Any book or lecture can tell you how to do a thing. But in any craft, whether it is cooking or carpentry or science or leadership, there are certain forms of knowledge that can’t be put into rules or recipes—practical forms of knowledge that only mentors can teach.
• Practical knowledge, on the other hand, cannot be taught or learned but only imparted and acquired. It exists only in practice. When we talk about practical knowledge, we tend to use bodily metaphors. We say that somebody has a touch for doing some activity—an ability to hit the right piano key with just enough force and pace. We say that somebody has a feel for the game, an intuition for how events are going to unfold, an awareness of when you should plow ahead with a problem and when you should put it aside before coming back to it. We say that somebody has taste, an aesthetic sense of what product or presentation is excellent, and which ones are slightly off.
• When the expert is using her practical knowledge, she isn’t thinking more; she is thinking less. She has built up a repertoire of skills through habit and has thereby extended the number of tasks she can perform without conscious awareness. This sort of knowledge is built up through experience, and it is passed along through shared experience. It is passed along by a mentor who lets you come alongside and participate in a thousand situations.
• A textbook can teach you the principles of biology, but a mentor shows you how to think like a biologist. This kind of habitual practice rewires who you are inside. “The great thing in all education,” William James wrote, “is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”
• “The teacher, that professional amateur,” the critic Leslie Fiedler once wrote, “teaches not so much the subject as himself.”
  • And that is something that most young people, and maybe all of us, want to be taught. What most people seek in life, especially when young, is not happiness but an intensity that reaches into the core. 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 looks like, day by day. As Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “Moral education is impossible without the habitual vision of greatness.”
• Or, as Sir Richard Livingstone put it, “The most indispensable viaticum for the journey of life is a store of adequate ideals, and these are acquired in a very simple way, by living with the best things in the world—the best pictures, the best buildings, the best social or political orders, the best human beings. The way to acquire a good taste in anything, from pictures to architecture, from literature to character, from wine to cigars, is always the same—be familiar with the best specimens of each.”
• By thrusting us face-to-face with excellence, mentors also induce a certain humility. They teach us how to humbly submit to the task.
• They give us the freedom to not fear our failures, but to proceed with a confidence that invites them, knowing they can be rectified later on. One of the things good writing mentors do, for example, is to teach you not to be afraid to write badly. Get the first draft out even if it’s awful. Your ego is not at stake. Finally, mentors teach how to embrace the struggle—that the struggle is the good part.=
• William James concluded that there is something in us that seems to require difficulty and the overcoming of difficulty, the presence of both light and darkness, danger and deliverance. “But what our human emotions seem to require is the sight of struggle going on. The moment the fruits are being merely eaten, things become ignoble. Sweat and effort, human nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack, yet getting through it alive, and then turning its back on its success to pursue another [challenge] more rare and arduous still—this is the sort of thing the presence of which inspires us.”
• At their highest, James argued, human beings are ideal-forming animals. And their lives go best when they are lived in service to an ideal. As he climactically put it, “The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing, the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man’s or woman’s pains.”
• The last thing a mentor does, of course, is send you out into the world and, in some sense, cut you off.

TWELVE Vampire Problems

• The paradox of life is that people seem to deliberate more carefully over the little choices than the big ones.
• Logic can’t help much with these ultimate questions. Logic is really good when the ends of a decision are clear, when you are playing a game with a defined set of rules.
• 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?

• In choosing a vocation, it’s precisely wrong to say that talent should trump interest. Interest multiplies talent and is in most cases more important than talent. 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 Greeks had a concept, later seized by Goethe, called the daemonic. A daemon is a calling, an obsession, a source of lasting and sometimes manic energy. Daemons are mysterious clusters of energy deep in the unconscious that were charged by some mysterious event in childhood that we imperfectly comprehend—or by some experience of trauma, or by some great love or joy or longing that we spend the rest of our lives trying to recapture. The daemon identifies itself as an obsessive interest, a feeling of being at home at a certain sort of place, doing a certain activity—standing in front of classroom, helping a sick person out of bed, offering hospitality at a hotel.
• When you see an individual at the peak of her powers, it’s because she has come into contact with her daemon, that wound, that yearning, that core irresolvable tension.

When you see a city in the midst of an artistic renaissance, such as Florence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it’s because the people in it are haunted by some fervent clash of values deep in their culture, and they struggle—usually fruitlessly—to resolve the tension. In the Florentine case, the clash between the classical moral ecology and the Christian one sparked off enormous energy. In a thousand different ways, the Florentines tried to square that unsquarable circle.

Note:I don’t know why but my instinct is telling me this paragraph is extremely important in uncovering a deep truth.

• When you are looking for a vocation, you are looking for a daemon. You are trying to enact the same fall that is the core theme of this book—to fall through the egocentric desires and plunge down into the substrate to where your desires are mysteriously formed. You are trying to find that tension or problem that arouses great waves of moral, spiritual, and relational energy. That means you are looking into the unconscious regions of heart and soul that reason cannot penetrate. You are trying to touch something down there in the Big Shaggy, that messy thicket that sits somewhere below awareness.
• By one calculation the mind can take in eleven million bits of information a second, of which the conscious mind is aware of forty. The rest is in the Big Shaggy. As Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia put it, consciousness is like a snowball sitting on an iceberg. In other words, most of what guides us is not our conscious rationalization; it’s our unconscious realm.
• 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.
• I remember thinking: Oh, that’s what it takes. You can’t write military bestsellers unless you genuinely feel what you’re writing about is the coolest thing on earth. It won’t work unless the boyish enthusiasm flows genuinely from your very heart. You can’t fake it.
• “That’s it. That’s what I am. I’m a dancer. I just knew it like that. And after that, everything was just sheer bliss that I had to do.”
• There comes a time in many careers when people face a choice between helping a small number of people a lot or helping a large number of people a little.
• The thing other people call “impact,” or working “at scale,” is overrated. But in most of the cases I’ve been around, people take the promotion. Their new job as a principal (or editor, or manager, or what have you) will be a lot less fun, but it will be more rewarding. They went into their vocation for the immediate aesthetic pleasure of some activity, but over time, they realize they are most fulfilled when they are instruments for serving an institution that helps address a problem. They have found their vocation.
• At that point a feeling of certainty clicks in. When that happens, you aren’t asking, “What should I do with my life?” Instead, one day you wake up and realize the question has gone away.
• The best advice I’ve heard for people in search of a vocation is to say yes to everything. Say yes to every opportunity that comes along, because you never know what will lead to what. Have a bias toward action. Think of yourself as a fish that is hoping to get caught. Go out there among the fishhooks.
• Simple questions help you locate your delight. 
  • What do I enjoy talking about?
  • When have I felt most needed?
  • What pains am I willing to tolerate?
  • 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.

• When you feel the tug of such a moment, Swaniker advises, ask three big questions: 
  • First, Is it big enough?
  • Second, “Am I uniquely positioned…to make this happen?” Look back on the experiences you have had. Have they prepared you for this specific mission? 
  • Third, “Am I truly passionate?” Does the issue generate obsessive thinking? Does it keep you up at night?

• “As I connected the dots, I realized that the last 15 years had been preparing me with the expertise, know-how and relationships to pull off this much bigger feat.
• Two final features of the vocation decision. 
  • First, it’s not about creating a career path. It’s asking, What will touch my deepest desire? What activity gives me my deepest satisfaction? 
  • Second, it’s about fit. A vocation decision is not about finding the biggest or most glamorous problem in the world. Instead, it’s about finding a match between a delicious activity and a social need. It’s the same inward journey we’ve seen before: the plunge inward and then the expansion outward. 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.

THIRTEEN Mastery

• A job is a way of making a living, but work is a particular way of being needed, of fulfilling the responsibility that life has placed before you. Martin Luther King, Jr., once advised that your work should have length—something you get better at over a lifetime. It should have breadth—it should touch many other people. And it should have height—it should put you in service to some ideal and satisfy the soul’s yearning for righteousness.
• Belden Lane’s work is trying to write down and describe the spiritual transcendence he sometimes experiences in nature. But he can’t just tell people at dinner parties he’s a guy who wanders around in the woods seeking transcendence. “My own particular cover is that of a university professor,” he writes. “It’s a way of looking responsible while attending to much more important things.”
• All real work has testing thresholds, moments when the world and fate roll stones in your path. All real work requires discipline. “If one is courteous but does it without ritual, then one dissipates one’s energies,” Confucius wrote.
• All real work requires a dedication to engage in deliberate practice, the willingness to do the boring things over and over again, just to master a skill.
• The more creative the activity is, the more structured the work routine should probably be.
• Dorfman says that this kind of structured discipline is necessary if you want to escape the tyranny of the scattered mind. “Self-discipline is a form of freedom… Freedom from laziness and lethargy, freedom from expectations and the demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear—and doubt.”
• The mind is focused when it is going forward in a straight line, he argues. The discipline is to put the task at the center. The pitcher’s personality isn’t at the center. His talent and anxiety aren’t at the center. The task is at the center. The master has the ability to self-distance from what he is doing. He’s able to be cool about the thing he feels most passionate about.

THE VOCATION MAKES THE PERSON 

• Work is the way we make ourselves useful to our fellows. “There may be no better way to love your neighbor,” Tim Keller put it, “whether you are writing parking tickets or software or books, than to simply do your work. But only skillful, competent work will do.”
• 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.
• If you watch people over the course of long careers, you notice that people get better at some mental tasks and worse at others. They say the brain peaks early in life, in the twenties. After that, brain cells die, memory deteriorates. But the lessons of experience compensate. We get much better at recognizing patterns and can make decisions with much less effort.
  • People who have achieved mastery no longer just see the individual chess pieces; they see the whole. They perceive the fields of forces that are actually driving the match. Musicians talk about seeing the entire architecture of a piece of music, not just the notes.

• When we talk about these moments afterward, we tend to emphasize the low ambitions in them and get shy when talking about the high ones, because we don’t want to sound pretentious. When you ask musicians why they went into music, they invariably say that they did it to get girls or be loved or make money, but those low motivations are often tales they tell because they don’t want to appear earnest about their high and powerful idealism—the need to express some emotion in themselves, to explore some experience.
• One of the best pieces of advice for young people is, Get to yourself quickly. If you know what you want to do, start doing it. Don’t delay because you think this job or that degree would be good preparation for doing what you eventually want to do. Just start doing it. Bruce Springsteen, with no plan B options and no distractions, got to himself quickly.
• Oswald Chambers once noted, “Drudgery is the touchstone of character.”
• He began, slowly, to get good. Springsteen walked into the room, where no one knew him, and let loose. As he wrote in his memoir, Born to Run, “I watched people sit up, move closer, and begin to pay serious attention.” What followed, he recalled, was “thirty scorching minutes of guitar Armageddon, then I walked off.”
• They went to Greenwich Village in New York, ninety minutes and a world away, and were hit by the hard truth that most of the bands there were better than they were. There are (at least) two kinds of failure. In the first kind you are good, but other people can’t grasp how good you are. In the second kind, you fail because you’re not as good as you thought you were, and other people see it.
• You can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but you can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.
• The band would not be a democracy. He would run it. (Springsteen – total control) 
• Rock and roll is about wildness and pleasure, but after his concerts Springsteen has a ritual. He’s in his hotel room alone—with fried chicken, french fries, a book, TV, and bed. Art is, as Springsteen says, a bit of a con job. It’s about projecting an image of the rock star, even if you don’t really live it.
• There’s a moment in many successful careers when the prospect of success tries to drag you away from your source, away from the daemon that incited your work in the first place. It is an act of raw moral courage to reject the voices all around and to choose what you have chosen before. It looks like you are throwing away your chance at stardom, but you are actually staying in touch with what got you there.

PART III Marriage 

FOURTEEN The Maximum Marriage

A beautiful marriage is not dramatic. It is hard to depict in novel and song because the acts that define it are so small, constant, and particular. 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 grand level, marriage means offering love, respect, and safety, but day to day, there are never-ending small gestures of tact and consideration, in which you show you understand her moods, you cherish his presence, that this other person is the center of your world. 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.

• Marriage is the ups and downs. There are private jokes, retelling the stories about the sacred places where love was born, hearing his familiar anecdotes at dinner parties, and, inevitably, endless planning.
• That passage from Corinthians that everybody reads at weddings really does define marital love: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”
• Who you marry is the most important decision you will ever make.
• 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. They are the happy ones, the blessed ones. And that is the dream of marital union that lures us on. “What greater thing is there for two human souls,” George Eliot wrote in Adam Bede, “than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of last parting?”
• Gabriel García Márquez captured it when describing an old couple in Love in the Time of Cholera: In the end they knew each other so well that by the time they had been married for thirty years they were like a single divided being, and they felt uncomfortable at the frequency with which they guessed each other’s thoughts….It was the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other mortal trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.
• “These men came to adulthood with intense, long-postponed needs for love and closeness.”

THE ASSAULT OF MAXIMUM MARRIAGE

• The assault on maximal marriage comes from three directions. 
  • First, in a culture where divorce is common, and the effects often severe, many people adopt a safety-first attitude. Don’t put your eggs in the marriage basket. Don’t reach for the stars; just build something sensible that won’t fall apart. Many people who have been hurt by divorce prioritize self-protection over complete vulnerability.
  • Second, many people find themselves in marriages that aren’t that great, and they embrace a definition of marriage that allows them to make do. They are, in Wallerstein and Blakeslee’s words, “companionate marriages.” The couple gets along. They parent together. But the passion has faded. They may or may not have sex, and if they do, it is rare. Work and parenting become the most important part of the spouses’ lives, and the marriage comes in third, or fourth, or fifth.
  • Third, the culture of individualism undermines the maximal definition of marriage. We live in the culture, Northwestern sociologist Eli Finkel observes, in which the needs of the self take priority over all other needs. The purpose of life is to self-actualize, to express your own autonomy and individuality, to climb Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. As Finkel writes, “Expressive individualism is characterized by a strong belief in individual specialness; voyages of self-discovery are viewed as ennobling.”
  • In an individualistic culture, marriage is not fusion; it is alliance. The psychologist Otto Rank redefined relationship as a social connection in which “one individual is helping the other to develop and grow, without infringing too much on the other’s personality.”

IN PRAISE OF MAXIMAL MARRIAGE 

• One problem with the individualistic view, as always, is that it traps people in the small prison of the self. If you go into marriage seeking self-actualization, you will always feel frustrated because marriage, and especially parenting, will constantly be dragging you away from the goals of self.
• Another problem with the individualistic view is that it doesn’t give us a script to fulfill the deepest yearnings. The heart yearns to fuse with others. This can be done only through an act of joint surrender, not through joint autonomy.
• In the committed life, a maximal marriage is viewed the way the scholar of myth Joseph Campbell viewed it, as a heroic quest in which the ego is sacrificed for the sake of a relationship.
• In the ethos of commitment, marriage is a moral microcosm of life, in which each person freely chooses to take on responsibility for others, and become dependent on others in order to do something larger. In this understanding of marriage, people don’t become lovely by loving themselves; they become lovely by loving others, by making vows to others, by taking on the load of others and fulfilling those vows and carrying that load. All the dignity and gravity of life is in this surrender.
• The maximal marriage is something you hurl yourself into, burning the boats behind you. “We must return to an attitude of total abandonment,” Mike Mason writes in The Mystery of Marriage, “of throwing all our natural caution and defensiveness to the winds and putting ourselves entirely in the hands of love by an act of will. Instead of falling into love, we may now have to march into it.”

MARRIAGE IS THE ULTIMATE MORAL EDUCATION 

• Marriage is, as Lord Shaftesbury once put it, like a gem tumbler. It throws two people together and bumps them up against each other day after day so they are constantly chipping away at one another, in a series of “amicable collisions,” until they are bright. It creates all the situations in which you are more or less compelled to be a less selfish person than you were before.
• “If two spouses each say, ‘I’m going to treat my self-centeredness as the main problem in the marriage,’ you have the prospect of a truly great marriage.”
• Before you are married, as Alain de Botton notes, you can live under the illusion that you are easy to live with. But to be married is to volunteer for the most thorough surveillance program known to humankind. The person who is married is watched, more or less all the time. Worse, the awareness that you are being watched compels you to watch yourself. This new self-consciousness introduces you to yourself, to all the stupid things you do, from leaving the cupboards open, to the way you are silent and grumpy in the morning, to the way you avoid any difficult conversation or play passive-aggressive when you are feeling hurt, as if life were some elaborate game of victimhood in which if you can make your spouse feel guilty for hurting you you will get a slice of cherry cake at the end.
• Things get even harder when your spouse, who loves you so much, wants to help you become a better person. Your spouse wants to give you service. But we don’t want to receive service! We want to be independent and take care of our own lives. Back when we were single nobody gave us gifts, at least not the kind that required a humiliating acknowledgment of our dependence on another person. But in marriage the big humiliation is that you need help from somebody else.
• Great marriages are measured by how much the spouses are able to take joy in each other’s victories.
• Kierkegaard wrote about fighting under the victorious banner of love. “I secretly wear on my breast the ribbon of my order, love’s necklace of roses. Believe me, its roses do not wither. Even if they change with the years, they still do not fade; even if the rose is not as red, it is because it has become a white rose—it did not fade….What I am through her she is through me, and neither of us is anything by oneself, but we are what we are in union.”

FIFTEEN The Stages of Intimacy I

• It starts with a glance. You take a little look at a person—like any of the million little glances you take each day—but, this time, unexpectedly, a spark is struck, a flame is lit, an interest is aroused.
• Love starts as a focusing of attention. The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.

CURIOSITY 

• The second stage of intimacy is curiosity, the desire to know. Your energy is up. Your mind is moving toward something. You hope this person is as great as she seems to be.
• Think of the facets of curiosity: They are all comparable to the stages of early intimacy and early love. There is joyous exploration, the desire to learn more about the person. There is absorption, seeing only this person and not anyone else in the room. There is stretching, the willingness to be in new situations if you get the chance to be with him. There is what some psychologists call deprivation sensitivity, the feeling of emptiness when you are not with the person.
• There is what the experts call intrusive thinking: She’s on your mind all the time.
• You just want the other person around. As C. S. Lewis notes, at this stage you may not even be sexually attracted to each other, you’re just overwhelmed by this curiosity: “A man in this state really hasn’t leisure to think of sex. He is too busy thinking of a person. The fact that she is a woman is far less important than the fact that she is herself. He is full of desire, but the desire may not be sexually toned. If you asked him what he wanted, the true reply would often be, ‘To go on thinking of her.’ ”

DIALOGUE 

• You talk. Dialogue is the third state of intimacy. It is the dance of mutual unveiling.
• The biggest problem in the dialogue phase is fear. 
  • Intimacy happens when somebody shares something emotionally meaningful, and the other person receives it and shares back. One obvious fear is that you’ll expose your tender flesh and the other person will trample it and then leave. Another obvious fear is that you’ll discover that the other person seeks a future you cannot provide. The deeper and more potent fear is that in exposing yourself to others you will actually understand yourself.

• When you choose to marry someone, you had better choose someone you’ll enjoy talking with for the rest of your life. It doesn’t work unless two people can fall into a state of fluid conversational flow.

SIXTEEN The Stages of Intimacy II

1. B Priestley once observed that there is probably no talk quite so delightful as the talk between two people who are not yet in love, but who might fall in love, and are aware that each has hidden reserves waiting to be explored.

• Combustion is the phase when you finally see the other person at full depth. Not the way others see, but the way only you can see.
• She is just coming into the living room, home from work, her hair a little frazzled, juggling a dozen bags and things, and she looks up in the doorway, outlined by the light behind her, her mouth half open expectantly, and you just think—I saw you. I saw all the way through.
• Love is hunting for bigger game than happiness. Love is a union of souls. When one member of a couple suffers from Alzheimer’s, the other doesn’t just go away. Instead, as Lewis puts it, love says, “Better this than parting. Better to be miserable with her than happy without her. Let our hearts break provided they break together.”
• You notice it in lovers who are slowly dying from cancer or some lingering illness. The dying are strong while their partners fall apart. It seems to be weirdly easier to be the victim of the disease than the one who has to watch the beloved suffer.

Adam to Eve in Paradise Lost: “We are one / One flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself.” Iain Thomas: “This is my skin and it’s thick. This is not your skin, yet you are under it.”

SEVENTEEN The Marriage Decision

THE THREE LENSES 

• This is the moment to ask hard questions about yourself. Everybody spends too much time appraising the other person when making marriage decisions, but the person who can really screw things up is you. These are questions such as:
  • Have you got to the place where you can really do this? D. H. Lawrence once wrote, “You can’t worship love and individuality in the same breath.” The ultimate question for yourself is whether you are ready to lose control and be overwhelmed by marriage, come what may.
  • Do I like the person I am when I’m around him? We all have multiple personalities we project into the world, depending on whom we are around. 
  • Does this person bring out your crass, social-climbing self, or your kind, serving self?
  • What’s my core issue, and does this person fill it? We tend to marry the person who fills our greatest unresolved psychic problem. Maybe you yearn for emotional reliability, and this person is your steady hand. Maybe you yearn for emotional intensity, and this person is your fountain of love.
  • How high is my bar? Some people say, Never settle: You had better feel insanely lucky to have this person. Others say, Be more realistic: You’re never going to find the perfect person, and it’s better to be in a decent relationship than alone. Jane Austen thought it was “wicked” to settle, and I’m with her. If you marry without total admiration and rapture, you will not have enough passion to fuse you together in the early days, and you will split apart when times get hard. Moreover, settling is immoral because there is another person involved. The other person is not going to want to be the fourth best option in your life.
  • The rest of the questions are about the other person and the relationship itself. The most important consideration is this: 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?

So how do you discern a person’s permanent personality traits? In 1938, the researcher Lewis Terman argued that you should look at a person’s relational background. He ranked the things to look for: 

• Superior happiness of parents 
• Childhood happiness 
• Lack of conflict with mother 
• Home discipline that was firm, not harsh 
• Strong attachment to mother 
• Strong attachment to father 
• Lack of conflict with father 
• Parental frankness about matters of sex 
• Infrequency and mildness of childhood punishment 
• Premarital attitude toward sex that was free from disgust or aversion

Disagreement is inevitable, and marriages survive it, but contempt is deadly and always kills a marital bond. So a crucial question is, Do I deeply admire this person? 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?

• When you are choosing a spouse, you are choosing the mother or father to your children. So the question is, Does this person have the qualities you would want passed down to your precious kids?
• Sooner or later in any marriage, sickness or ill fortune or something else will strip you down to your essentials. So the question is, What is at the core of this person, after you take away the education, the skills, the accomplishments, and the brands?
• He never lost his deep respect for what he saw in her soul. “Throughout my life,” she wrote, after his death, “it has always seemed a kind of mystery to me that my good husband not only loved and respected me as many husbands love and respect their wives, but almost worshipped me, as though I were some special being created just for him. And that was true not only at the beginning of our marriage but through all the remaining years of it, up to his very death.”

EIGHTEEN Marriage: The School You Build Together

• A marriage survives when both partners admit their individual inadequacy to the challenges before them. A marriage survives when the partners agree to take lifelong courses together—in subjects like empathy, communication, and recommitment.
• Marital love is being aware of how the past is present in the marriage. Psychologists joke that a marriage is a battleground in which two families send their best warriors to determine which family’s culture will direct the couple’s lives.
• Before you were together, the influence of these lineages was largely unconscious; it was just the way you did things. But in the first few months of marriage, your way of doing things comes into contact with another way of doing things.
• often comes in the form of an unexpected eruption. You completely overreact to some small thing your partner has done, and in the middle of your overreaction you are silently asking yourself, “What the hell is going on?!”
• One of the most common forms of marital breakdown is the demand-withdraw cycle. One partner makes a request of the other—clean the house, show up on time—but there’s a hint of blame within the request. The other partner hears the request as nagging or complaining. Instead of fully engaging, this partner just withdraws.
• In the end, people in an enduring marriage achieve Metis. That’s the Greek word for a kind of practical wisdom, an intuitive awareness of how things are, how things go together, and how things will never go together.
• A teacher with metis can feel when the classroom is just beginning to get out of control. A mechanic with metis has a feel for what’s wrong with the engine based on some semi-consciously heard rumble or sound. A marriage partner with metis knows when to give space and when to intrude, when to offer the surprise gift and when not to tell the teasing joke.
• A well-mannered conversation is shaped by what John Gottman calls the pattern of bids and volleys. Let’s say you are reading the paper at the dining room table and your partner comes up and says, “Look at the beautiful blue jay on the tree outside the window.” That’s a conversational bid. You might look up and exclaim, “Wow, that is beautiful. Thanks for pointing it out.” That’s a “toward bid.” With your remark, you are moving toward your partner. Or you could respond, “I was reading the paper; would you please let me finish?” That would be an “against bid.” Or you could just grunt and ignore the remark or change the subject with a non sequitur. The would be a “turning-away bid.”
• In marriages that succeed, Gottman has found, the couple experiences five toward bids for every one against or turning-away bid. The people Gottman calls “relationship masters” go out of their way to store up chits in their emotional bank account.
• Divorce doesn’t generally happen when the number of conflicts increases; it happens when the number of positive things decreases. Julie Gottman, John’s wife, points out that masters of relationship are on alert for what their partner is doing right, and they are quick to compliment.
• According to the Gottmans, there are four kinds of unkindness that drive couples apart: 
  • Contempt
  • Criticism
  • Defensiveness
  • Stonewalling. 
  • The rule of their research is pretty simple: If you’re tired and your partner makes a bid, turn toward in kindness. If you’re distracted, turn toward in kindness. If you’re stressed, turn toward in kindness.

THE ART OF RECOMMITMENT 

• There are two classic crisis periods in marriage—just after the children are born and in the doldrums of middle age. In the former, the temptation is to replace the complicated and difficult relationship you have with your spouse for the joyous and captivating love you have with your children. In the latter crisis, people in middle age are haunted by a feeling of generalized sadness and incompleteness.
• The experts are aligned when it comes to how to recommit: Don’t expect some ultimate solution to the big disagreement in your marriage. Overwhelm the negative by increasing the positive. Swamp negative interactions with the five love languages: words of affirmation, acts of service, gifts, quality time, and personal touch.

PART IV Philosophy and Faith NINETEEN Intellectual Commitments

• It did that by exposing students to excellence. “One is apt to think of moral failure as due to weakness of character,” the British educator Sir Richard Livingstone wrote. “More often it is due to an inadequate ideal.” So one job of a teacher was, in this educational model, to hold up exemplars. “I make honorable things pleasant to children,” a Spartan educator put it. When the students emerged from school they would have had at least some contact with the best things human beings have thought and done.
• There is an old saying that if you catch on fire with enthusiasm people will come for miles to watch you burn. Part of my education was just watching my professors burn.
• philosopher Eva Brann put it, there is a feeling of delightful humility in knowing that you are lesser, but are bound by love to something greater, that you recognize superiority and are inspired by it.
• Once you’ve had a glimpse of the highest peaks of the human experience, it’s hard to live permanently in the flatlands down below. It’s a little hard to be shallow later in life, no matter how inclined in that direction you might be.

INTELLECTUAL VIRTUES

• All of us require a constructive philosophy of life, a set of criteria to determine what is more valuable than what. Fortunately, over the centuries human beings at different times and different places have come up with distinct systems of values and ways of finding meaning in the world.
• John Ruskin once wrote, “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.”
• Emotional knowledge, Roger Scruton argues, is knowing what to feel in certain situations—so that you can be properly disgusted by injustice, properly reverent before an act of self-sacrifice, properly sympathetic in friendship, and properly forbearing when wronged. This emotional knowledge is a skill that has to be acquired like any other. We are all born with certain basic emotions, but we have to be taught what it feels like to be in circumstances we haven’t directly experienced—the sense of dehumanizing invisibility
• Rilke, but we can sort of understand what he was getting at: “I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything penetrates more deeply into me and does not stop at the place where until now it always used to finish. I have an inner self of which I was ignorant. Everything goes thither now. What happens there I do not know.”
• They were really about trying to figure out what was worth wanting, what desire was better than the others, what longings were to be embraced and which ones were to be subordinated or renounced.
• One of the nicest compliments I ever got from one of my own students, at Yale, came on the last day of class: “This class has made me sadder,” one outstanding man reflected. He meant it in a good way, and I took it as that. Once you’ve been introduced to some of history’s greatest lovers, and seen what kind of love is possible, it’s hard to feel completely satisfied because you have an A average. You’ll always be plagued by a sort of dissatisfaction. Moreover, that dissatisfaction will never go away, because the more progress you make toward your ideals, the more they seem to recede into the distance. As artists get better at their craft, their vision of what they are capable of dashes out even further ahead.
• But ultimately joy is found not in satisfying your desires but in changing your desires so you have the best desires. The educated life is a journey toward higher and higher love.

TWENTY Religious Commitment

• Frankl discovered that while the body grows according to what it consumes, the soul grows by the measure of love it pours out.
• Frankl said that this was the first time he understood the words “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of infinite glory.” He spent the rest of his long life arguing that human beings’ primary motive is not for money or even happiness, but for meaning. We are driven above all to understand the purpose of our lives. Once that is understood even the most miserable conditions cannot upend inner peace.
• He found, in the course of his research in the camp, that the prisoners who died quickly of disease or some breakdown were those who had nothing outside the camp that they were committed to. But those who survived had some external commitment that they desired and pushed toward, whether it was a book they felt called to write or a wife they were compelled to come back to. One day in the concentration camp, he met a young woman, ill and dying in the infirmary. “I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,” she told him. “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.” 
• “Bless you, prison,” the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago. “Bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”
• The universe is alive and connected, these moments tell us. There are dimensions of existence you never could have imagined before. Quantum particles inexplicably flip together, even though they are separated by vast differences of time and space. Somehow the world is alive and communicating with itself. There is some interconnecting animating force, and we are awash in that force, which we with our paltry vocabulary call love.

TWENTY-ONE A Most Unexpected Turn of Events

• The key question is whether they respond to the challenge with the right inner posture—whether they express charity when it is called for, forgiveness when it is necessary, and great humility before goodness.
• “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ ” Alasdair MacIntyre wrote, “if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’ ” If there are no overarching stories, then life is meaningless.
• Imagine a better future; build a better future.

PART V Community TWENTY-THREE The Stages of Community Building I

THE BEAUTIFUL COMMUNITY 

• A healthy community is a thick system of relationships. It is irregular, dynamic, organic, and personal. Neighbors show up to help out when your workload is heavy, and you show up when theirs is. In a rich community, people are up in one another’s business, know each other’s secrets, walk with each other in times of grief, and celebrate together in times of joy. In a rich community, people help raise one another’s kids.
• In these kinds of communities, the social pressure can be slightly overbearing, the intrusiveness sometimes hard to bear, but the discomfort is worth it because the care and benefits are so great.
• The phrase “social capital” suggests that the thing it measures is quantitative. But care is primarily qualitative. A community is healthy when relationships are felt deeply, when there are histories of trust, a shared sense of mutual belonging, norms of mutual commitment, habits of mutual assistance, and real affection from one heart and soul to another.
• Community renewal begins, as you can imagine, with a commitment. Somebody decides to put community over self.
• T-shirts. “I love small victories,”
• There’s a boy on the beach who finds thousands of starfish washed ashore, dying. He picks one up and throws it back into the ocean. A passerby asks him why he bothered. All these thousands of other starfish are still going to die. “Well,” the boy responds, “I saved that one.”
• The work by sociologist Eric Klinenberg shows just how important neighborhood is in determining who will survive in a crisis. Klinenberg compared deaths in two Chicago neighborhoods during a heat wave in 1995. More than six times as many people died in North Lawndale as in South Lawndale, even though the two places are demographically comparable and separated by nothing more than a road.
• Klinenberg discovered that the key ingredient was the thickness of community bonds.

TWENTY-FIVE Conclusion: The Relationalist Manifesto

• There is another way to find belonging. There is another way to find meaning and purpose. There is another vision of a healthy society. It is through relationalism. It is by going deep into ourselves and finding there our illimitable ability to care, and then spreading outward in commitment to others.
• As adults, we measure our lives by the quality of our relationships and the quality of our service to those relationships. Life is a qualitative endeavor, not a quantitative one. It’s not how many, but how thick and how deep. Defining what a quality relationship looks like is a central task of any moral ecology.
• The relationalist says, Life operates by an inverse logic. I possess only when I give. I lose myself to find myself. When I surrender to something great, that’s when I am strongest and most powerful.

The Process of Becoming a Person 

• The central journey of modern life is moving self to service. We start out listening to the default settings of the ego and gradually learn to listen to the higher callings of the heart and soul.
• The heart is that piece of us that longs for fusion with others. We are not primarily thinking creatures; we are primarily loving and desiring creatures. We are defined by what we desire. We become what we love. The core question for each of us is, Have we educated our emotions to love the right things in the right way?
• The movement toward becoming a person is downward and then outward: To peer deeper into ourselves where we find the yearnings for others, and then outward in relationship toward the world. A person achieves self-mastery, Maritain wrote, for the purpose of self-giving.
• The relationalist doesn’t walk away from the capitalist meritocracy, the systems of mainstream life. But she balances that worldview with a countervailing ethos that supplements, corrects, and ennobles. She walks in that world, with all its pleasures and achievements, but with a different spirit, a different approach, and different goals. She is communal where the world is too individual. She is more emotional when the world is too cognitive. She is moral when the world is too utilitarian.

The Good Life 

• The relationalist is not trying to dominate life by sheer willpower. He is not gripping the steering wheel and trying to strategize his life. He has made himself available. He has opened himself up so that he can hear a call and respond to a summons. He is asking, What is my responsibility here? 
• When a person finds his high calling in life, it doesn’t feel like he has taken control; it feels like he has surrendered control. The most creative actions are those made in response to a summons.
• The summons often comes in the form of love. A person falls in love with her child, her husband, her neighborhood, her calling, or her God. And with that love comes an urge to make promises—to say, I will always love you. I will always serve you and be there for you. Life is a vale of promise making.
• The life of a relationalist is defined by its commitments. The quality and fulfillment of her life will be defined by what she commits to and how she fulfills those commitments.
• The person makes his commitments maximal commitments. He doesn’t just have a career; he has a vocation. He doesn’t just have a contract marriage (What’s in it for me?). He has a covenantal marriage (I live and die for you). He doesn’t just have opinions. He submits to a creed. He doesn’t just live in a place. He helps build a community. Furthermore, he is not just committed to this abstract notion of “community.” He is committed to a specific community, to a specific person, to a specific creed—things grounded in particular times and places.
• A committed life involves some common struggles. It is, for example, a constant struggle to see people at their full depths.
• The relationalist tries to see each individual as a whole person—as a body, mind, heart, and soul.

The Good Society

• Personal transformation and social transformation happen simultaneously. When you reach out and build community, you nourish yourself.
• Relationships do not scale. They have to be built one at a time, through patience and forbearance. But norms do scale. When people in a community cultivate caring relationships, and do so repeatedly in a way that gets communicated to others, then norms are established.

A Declaration of Interdependence

• A good life is a symbiotic life—serving others wholeheartedly and being served wholeheartedly in return. It is daily acts of loving-kindness, gentleness in reproach, forbearance after insult. It is an adventure of mutual care, building, and exploration. The crucial question is not, Who I am? but, Whose am I?

• There comes a moment, which may come early or later in life, when you realize what your life is actually about. You look across your life and review the moments when you felt more fully alive, at most your best self. They were usually moments when you were working with others in service of some ideal.
• That is the moment when you achieve clarity about what you should do and how you should live. That is the moment when the ego loses its grip. There is a sudden burst of energy that comes with freedom from the self-centered ego. Life becomes more driven and more gift. That is the moment when a life comes to a point.
• When you see that, you realize joy is not just a feeling, it is a moral outlook. It is a permanent state of thanksgiving and friendship, communion and solidarity. This is not an end to troubles and cares. Life doesn’t offer us utopia. But the self has shrunk back to its proper size. When relationships are tender, when commitments are strong, when communication is pure, when the wounds of life have been absorbed and the wrongs forgiven, people bend toward each other, intertwine with one another, and some mystical combustion happens. Love emerges between people out of nothing, as a pure flame.