The Second Mountain

People in their odyssey years tend to be dementedly optimistic about the long-term future. Ninety-six percent of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds agree with the statement "I am very sure that someday I will get to where I want to be in life."

Living online often means living in a state of diversion. When you’re living in diversion you’re not actually deeply interested in things; you’re just bored at a more frenetic pace.

Acedia is the quieting of passion. It is a lack of care. It is living a life that doesn’t arouse your strong passions and therefore instills a sluggishness of the soul, like an oven set on warm. The person living in acedia may have a job and a family, but he is not entirely grabbed by his own life. His heart is over there, but his life is over here.

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. Dying to the old self, cleansing in the emptiness, resurrecting in the new. From the agony of the valley, to the purgation in the desert, to the insight on the mountaintop.

When you have been away in the wilderness for weeks, you begin to move at kairos time

"To be human is to be on the move, pursuing something, after something. We are like existential sharks: we have to move to live."

In his novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernières described this last best stop on the journey of heart. An old guy is talking to his daughter about his love for his late wife. He tells her, "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.

People feel bereft when they don’t experience purpose and meaning in their lives. Even criminals and sociopaths come up with rationalizations to explain why the bad things they did were actually good or at least excusable because nobody can live with the idea that they are thoroughly bad.

Because we all have souls, we are all involved in a moral drama, of which we might have lower or higher awareness in any given moment. When we do something good we feel elevation, and when we do something bad we start making moral justifications.

are six layers of desire:

Material pleasure. Having nice food, a nice car, a nice house.

Ego pleasure. Becoming well-known or rich and successful. Winning victories and recognition.

Intellectual pleasure. Learning about things. Understanding the world around us.

Generativity. The pleasure we get in giving back to others and serving our communities.

Fulfilled love. Receiving and giving love. The rapturous union of souls.

Transcendence. The feeling we get when living in accordance with some ideal.

"A person’s life can be meaningful only if she cares fairly deeply about some things, only if she is gripped, excited, interested, engaged," writes the philosopher Susan Wolf. Notice the verbs Wolf uses: "gripped," "excited," "engaged." They describe response at some deep level, not a self-initiated conscious choice. These are the verbs our community builders use.

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," he wrote, "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."

Life is filled with vampire problems. Marriage turns you into a different person. Having kids changes who you are and what you want. So does emigrating to a new country, converting to a different religion, going to med school, joining the Marines, changing careers, and deciding on where to live. Every time you make a commitment to something big, you are making a transformational choice.

Furthermore, you’re aware that this is the kind of choice that will cast a lingering shadow. Every choice is a renunciation, or an infinity of renunciations. You will be forever after aware of the road not taken, what might have been if you’d gone another way. You could be opening yourself up to a lifetime of regret.

The paradox of life is that people seem to deliberate more carefully over the little choices than the big ones. Before buying a car, they read all the ratings, check out resale values on the Internet, and so on. But when it comes to choosing a vocation, they just sort of slide rather than decide. They slide incrementally into a career because someone gave them a job. They marry the person whom they happen to be living with. For many, the big choices in life often aren’t really choices; they are quicksand. You just sink into the place you happen to be standing.

Decision-making experts fill books with clear decision stages: preparation (identify the problem; determine your objectives), search (assemble a list of the possible jobs or people that will help you meet your objectives), evaluation (make a chart and rate the options on a ten-point scale according to various features), confrontation (ask disconfirming questions; create constructive disagreement to challenge existing premises), selection (tally up the scores; build a consequences table that will help you envision the future outcome of each choice).

For example, when you are considering quitting your job, apply the 10-10-10 rule. How will this decision feel in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years? That will help you put the short-term emotional pain of any decision in the context of long-term consequences.

When buying a house, look at eighteen houses on the market without making a decision about any of them. Then make an offer on the next home that is better than the first eighteen. That will ensure that you have a fair sample of what’s out there before making any choice.

When you raise children, you notice that their daemons are wide-awake a lot of the time. They have direct access to these deep realms. Moral consciousness is our first consciousness. But as adults we have a tendency to cover over the substrate, to lose touch with the daemon and let it drift asleep. Sometimes we do this by being excessively analytic about everything

José Ortega y Gasset believed that most people devote themselves to avoiding that genuine self, to silencing the daemon and refusing to hear it. We bury the faint crackling of our inner fire underneath other, safer noises, and settle for a false life.

When you feel the tug of such a moment, Swaniker advises, ask three big questions:

First, Is it big enough? Those who have been fortunate to receive a good education, who are healthy, and have had great work experiences should not be solving small problems. If you were born lucky, you should solve big problems.

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? If your answer to each question is not a resounding yes, Swaniker advises, you should ignore that idea.

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. "If one is cautious but does it without ritual, one becomes timid; if one is bold but does it without ritual, then one becomes reckless; if one is forthright but does it without ritual, then one becomes rude."

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

"Self-discipline is a form of freedom," he writes. "Freedom from laziness and lethargy, freedom from expectations and the demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear—and doubt."

Emerson underlines one of the key elements of the commitment decision. At the beginning it involves a choice—choosing this or that vocation. But 99.9 percent of the time it means choosing what one has already chosen. 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

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."

"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

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

You would think that the schools would have provided you with course after course on the marriage decision, on the psychology of marriage, the neuroscience of marriage, the literature of marriage. But no, society is a massive conspiracy to distract you from the important choices of life in order to help you fixate on the unimportant ones.

Swamp negative interactions with the five love languages: words of affirmation, acts of service, gifts, quality time, and personal touch.

It took me a few decades to find out what kind of conservative I was, but eventually I realized that I’m a Burkean conservative. The core of what I think is true is contained in Burke’s Reflections. I don’t doubt the power of ideas because that book changed my life. By naming a philosophy, it called into being some knowledge that was latent within me. It has become a foundation for how I view the world. Ideas have consequences.

Fifth, they gave us emotional knowledge. To read Whitman as he exults in joy, to be with Antigone as she struggles to bury her brother, to travel with Galileo as he follows his discoveries wherever they may take him, to be with the mathematician Pascal as he feels the direct presence of God, or to travel with Sylvia Plath into the depths of madness is not necessarily to learn a new fact, but it is to have a new experience.

Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy

Mark Noll wrote a book called The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind—