The Second Mountain: The Next Big Challenge in Your Life

it's useful for me if you're a writer you're just basically working at your in public and so I was useful for me to see my life right now in the context of all the stages of life and so what I'm going to try to do over the next few minutes is run through some of the common stages in life some of the stages that a lot of us have been through which I hope put in context the next phase for each of our lives no matter where we are now so Wilson had his enunciation moment at age 7 in Paradise Beach something else sort of unfortunate unfortunate happened to him at that summer he was fishing you know he was he'd become fallen in love with the sea and he started fishing and so he fished for a pin fish and I guess a pin fish is a scaly fish with a long spiky tail and when he took the fish off the hook it flopped out of his hands into his face and the spike at the end of the tail pierced his right pupil and he was in excruciating pain kid 7 remember but he didn't want to leave the sea so he put the fish back and stayed at the sea all day came home for dinner at which time the pain is somewhat subsided so the family was with didn't do anything but within months he monks he had lost all the sight in his right eye so a certain sort of naturalism like birds was not going to be good for him and so it limited what he did and he was walking that same year in Pensacola and he happened across some fire ants and he had the same sensation he had when he was looking to the sea that here was this universe of behavior that fascinated him that gripped him that he longed to seize and possess and he really spent the next seven decades studying bugs and much else and becoming one of the greatest scientists of our country at Harvard so that was his Annunciation moment now we all have moments of wonder and things were kind of interested in but the second phase of life is the initiation there has to be some mentor on some institution that takes your moment of interest and trains you into how to turn it into a life and lifts your standard for how to conduct that wonder in the highest way Peter Drucker defined leadership as leadership is not magnetic personality that can just as well be a glib tongue it is not making friends and influencing people that is flattering leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights raising a person's performance to a higher standard and building a personality beyond its normal limitations and so Wilson found such a man a man named Philip Darlington who was a naturalist at Harvard darling told Wilson don't stay on the trails when you collect insects take a spot through the jungle and just carve your way through that spot and through a line and Darlington said this is going to be hard and once when Darlington was thirty-nine he was carving a trail through the jungle when across a river was digging down to dig up a sample of bugs and a crocodile left out of the river grabbed Arlington's right side dragged him into the river Darlington fought kicked it was released the crocodile grabbed again grabbed him down Darlington escaped again and walked miles back to a hospital while bleeding all the while but what inspired Wilson was not in getting free it was his whole bright side of his body was covered in a cast and he devised for the next three or four months the capacity to drag himself through the jungle using only his left side and to collect bugs with only his left side and that gave give us what I think a lot of us want when we were young a sense that this is going to be hard William James went to Chautauqua which was sort of the Aspen of the New York state and he said this is great but kind of unsatisfying what our human emotion seemed to require James said is the sight of struggle going on the moment the fruits are merely being eaten becomes ignoble sweat and effort human nature strained to the utmost and on the rack yet getting through it alive and then turning back on its success to pursue another struggle more rare and arduous still this is the sort of thing that inspires us James summed it all up that human existence is the same eternal things some man or woman's pains in pursuit of some exalted ideal and so Darlington took Wilson and inspiring and that is what we need through our initiation process my initiation process came at another institution not Harvard but the University of Chicago my joke about the Arusha Chicago it's my favorite line about it is that it's a Baptist School where atheist professors teach Jewish students st. Thomas Aquinas and it was foundational by the way in the funding of this organization and I went there and I was welcomed in there was when I went there there were still some refugees from world war ii and they believed with a fervor a religious fervor that the secret keys to life and existence were in certain great books and they introduced us like walking into an exalted cathedral into the world of the death of Socrates the fire of Joan of Arc the passion of Pascal the mathematician and they said you little twerps you can come at the end of this grand procession and it was exalted but it seemed great and it seemed something we could be a member of one of the greatest teachers of that time was a guy named Carl Weintraub and he was a hero to a lot of us and he wrote an email on his deathbed to my friend Carroll Quillin who was here early on the weekend president Davidson and he wrote about his experience trying to lift us to be something better than we are teaching Western Civ Weintraub wrote to Carol seems to confront me all too often with moments when I feel like screaming suddenly oh god my dear student why cannot you see that this matter is a real real matter often a matter of the very being for the person and the historical men you are looking at or at least supposed to be looking at if you do not come to feel any of the love that Pericles feel through a city how can you understand his parrot his funeral oration if you cannot fathom the power and the drive in thinking that he has a special mission how can you understand the death of Socrates how can you grasp anything of the problem the Galatian community without sensing in one bones the problem of worrying about God's acceptance sometimes when I have spent an hour or more pouring all my enthusiasm and Tiffy's into an effort to tell these stories in the fullness in which I see and experience them I feel drained and exalted exhausted I think it works on the student but that I do not really know and anybody who has taught knows that one of the tragedies of teaching is that sometimes professors pour more into a class than the students are able to receive but in truth what Weintraub was doing to those of us lucky enough to go through this institution this initiation process was more like planting the teachers like Weintraub were inserting seeds that would burst forth years and decades later when the realities of life called them forth and what they really did was not to give us information and I think what Darlington gave to Wilson was not information it was to give him in some information I think that's what schools do best the schools that are really successful what should you want and what's the highest thing you could possibly want and so what I learned at Chicago I think was the desire still working on it to see reality seeing reality seems like a very straightforward thing you just look out and see it but I live in the world of politics and people don't see reality straightforward they projected through their own desires their own wishes their our narcissism their own depression their fear and their insecurities John Ruskin once wrote the more I think of it I find this conclusion more impressed upon me that the greatest thing a human soul ever does is to see something and to tell what it saw in a plain way hundreds of people can talk for one who can think what thousands can think for one who can see and so what our learning institutions do and the reason we go to places like this not only to know what the people are saying but to be around people who model seeing reality clearly and in my education Shakespeare think of Shakespeare seeing reality think of humor tease George Eliot George Orwell on our rent when you see reality what you are planted with an ability to be intellectually honest but also planted with an ability to more deeply into your ownself the poet Rilke wrote I am learning to see I don't know why it is but everything penetrates more deeply into me but does not stop at the place where until now it always used to finish Ivan in herself of which I was ignorant everything goes there now what happens there I do not know and I think a great institution of learning gives students that nobody knows at that age what your inner self is like but you get a glimpse that it's there and you get a sense that you're going to fill that up and so that for me Chicago Darlington for Wilson I hope you can all think of examples of institutions that gave you your initiation your welcome into a craft your welcome into an industry your welcoming to a style of life now that happens when our young and then typically we blow it we're not really ready for what is being taught to us and we have to make our own mistakes the most important things in life are not learned they're experienced and so you have to go then to what I think it was the third phase in life after the Annunciation and the initiation the stage in your 20s what I call the Odyssey years and this is sort of the reveal of freedom when you're just getting out of college and suddenly you can do anything if you have any sort of talents you're like a stem cell and your blessing and your curse is that you could turn into absolutely anything and your blessing in your curse is that the life you've led so far leaves you completely unprepared for the challenges that now face you as you go through school you're living station to station you got this test this homework assignment this degree this application process you get out of school in your 20s there are no more stations it's just open seas so instead of looking in front of you for what do I do next your challenge in your 20s is to look for the far far horizon and try to define what you're pointing at and that is a phenomenally hard problem it's a hard problem because we don't really train people to do that very well it's a hard problem I think these days because our culture is a recipe for making people individual stick and it's a recipe for making it really hard to find out what your purpose is I summarized the problems in our culture in a typically pseudo-intellectual University of Chicago way by saying that we made three beds philosophical debates in our culture we chose hobbes when we should have chosen Durkheim that is say we chose to think of ourselves as individuals when we're really relationships were too individualistic and not communitarian second we chose Descartes when we should have chosen Agustin we think of ourselves primarily of cognitive feeling creatures when we're primarily emotional longing creatures and third we chose Bentham when we should have chosen Frankel we think our lives are organized around pleasure and pain but really our seekers desire and our deepest desire is for purpose and meaning and if you grow up in a culture like that it's just really hard because you're not communal enough you're not emotionally intelligent enough and you're not purpose conscious enough and so people in their Odyssey years start at the bottom of the ladder underemployment bad bosses temporary internships periods of wandering in college highly educated highly paid people were paid to tell them how wonderful their thoughts were and to read their writing and vague close attention when they get out into the world that's all done and so I find the 20s is a lonely and a hard time we have in this country I think a Telos crisis we have a bunch of people in their 20s who graduated but who don't really know what their purpose is and then when the first failure comes when the moment of wandering the emotional breakup comes they collapse Nietzsche says he who has a why to live for can endure anyhow if you know what your purposes you can doral the setbacks but you don't know if or what your Y is then the setbacks really decimate you and so the young people and this is not generational is true for all of us or in our 20s if you're in a certain educational class what you try to do is you compensate for your lack of purpose by building success upon success the writer Matthias Dahl starred describes what he calls the insecure overachiever such a person he writes must have no stable or solid foundation to build upon and yet nonetheless tries to build his way out of his problem it is an impossible situation you can't compensate for having a foundation made of quicksand by building a new story on top of it but this person takes no notice and hopes the problem down in the foundations won't be found out if only the construction work keeps on going but I think eventually the foundational problems show up and they show up most profoundly in a sadness that was I think best described by David Foster Wallace back in 1996 he write it's more like a stomach level sadness I see it in myself and my friends in different ways it manifests itself in a kind of lossless this is a generation that has an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values is concerned and so the 20s is in many ways for all of us whether today or in previous generations a glorious fun time but I find especially now it's an extremely challenging time for a lot of people and I and it's easier in the educated class and but it's much harder further down below but fortunately often in this day by the end of the 20s you hit your fourth phase which is the phase of commitment making the phrase you might call coming to Sinai at a certain point you get tired of freedom you get tired of keeping your options open you get tired of bad dates you get tired at all those weekends where you practice full of material but you can't remember any of it by Wednesday you yearn for that unity that you see in other people one of there's this pasture in the 1950s called Henry Perry Emerson Fosdick who wrote a real person achieves a high degree of unity within himself he does not remain split and scattered but gets himself together into wholeness and coherence and when you're you're keeping your options open and you're spreading things far and wide what you're doing is you're living in the determinacy of your own passing feelings in your own changeable heart life is a series of temporary moments not an accumulating flow you're never all in for one or another because you're always looking for some other possibility you lay waste your powers scattering them in all directions and so at a certain point people say enough I'm going to start making choices and I'm going to start making commitments and what happens is I think at a certain stage in life you're unconscious definition of freedom changes when you're raised in your 20s to the sense of freedom as let's keep my options open but then you shift from freedom from - freedom - to a sense I want to have the freedom to do what I want to do a liberate you liberate yourself to a higher freedom and that means you have to take away some of your options you have to say a lot of noes for just a few yeses if you have to chain yourself to years of piano practice to have the freedom to really play you have to go from a life of open options to sweet compulsions my favorite definition of freedom is from Tim Keller freedom is not so much the absence of restraints it's finding the right ones and so at a certain point I think for a lot of people late in their 20s early in the 30s they want to find something they can really change them selves - and fortunately at this moment life has a tendency to help you out at this moment often in late 20s and early 30s by some fate you're brought together with something that kind of arrests you and interests you you have a chance for sort of another enunciation moment and often the first commitment that comes into people's minds is a vocation they find they really love sometimes it's a spouse or oh they find a man or a woman and they know that person's kind of interesting my wife told me this story that I love to retell she had a hairdresser in Houston named dahveed and dub you'd run two hair salons called attitudes of Paris and there was a young woman who was a pianist in Houston and she was moving to San Francisco to be with her fiance and she saw she'd get her hair cut one last time before she moved to San Francisco she went to attitudes of Paris and she walks in was first time she's ever been there she looks over and sees this guy dahveed cutting somebody else's hair she goes into the changing room quote puts on the gown and calls her mom and says you know I've just seen the man I'm actually going to marry so she goes out into the chair and she's sitting down and they're chit-chatting and Devon's cutting their hair and he says well what's your life story and she says well you know I'm a pianist I'm engaged to this guy in San Francisco I'm about to move out there but I won't do it if you'll marry me and so dubby told my wife I looked down on my scissors I never felt more free than I did at that instant and he said it's a deal and they've been married 18 years by the way so that's a pretty dramatic story but all of us have moments of where we happen to sit on the right subway car I met a guy who owns the Carolina Panthers I think his name is Richardson he was hitchhiking and some chick pulled over and picked him up and they've been married for 60 years and you have these freakish things you just get involved and so this love can strike anywhere and when it strikes you have this vague sense restriction instead of his smash hits that it feels completely new and as if it were there the whole time and we all meet people who are completely new and thrilling but it feels there the whole time somehow something answers something deep inside of us my colleague April Lawson said to me over conversation at the Times one day we were all missing something as children and as adults were willing to put up with a lot in order to get it it's very profound she's like 20 when she said that and there's something unconscious that latches into things and we begin and say in that person or in that job we begin to project some good nice future and then we begin to we want to learn about this thing something's interesting the opposite of love is not hate the opposite of love is indifference love is a process of intention and dahveed and this woman just were attentive to each other they were suddenly interested and we've all been in what happens next you want to begin to learn so you go out on a date you find these miraculous convince' dances you don't like foie gras I don't like foie gras amazing we should get married you know like the six dollar cupcake me neither toilet paper over the top we get it and so you begin to want to attach and you get into a dialogue you get into episodes and a reciprocity of greater and greater vulnerability and then there's the inflammation the desire of completely falling in love and the act of falling in love is the act of and making commitments and this is one of the peak phases of a life the commitment and making phase in my view most of us make four big commitments in our lives to a spouse and a family to a vocation to a philosophy or faith and to community and friends and the success and fulfillment of our lives depend on how well we choose these commitments and then how well we execute upon them and so what is a commitment a commitment is falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters Orthodox Jews love their God but they're going to keep kosher just in case and the commitment making is the process of totally devoting yourself to another thing and making a promise making the kind of promise that Ruth made to Naomi where you go I will go where you Lodge I will Lodge your people shall be my people and your God my God where you die I will die and there I will be buried a commitment forms our identities when you ask people who you are what do you do what you learn about them in the way they define themselves is what they commit themselves to to a vocation to a passion to a community to a spouse to a set of friends commitments form our character every time you make a promise to something and every time you keep that promise it's like spokes in a wagon wheel you strengthen the spokes every time you break a promise you remove a spoke and more likely the whole thing will collapse on ourselves and so in the making of our commitments which for a lot of us happens in our you're doing the active wood I'm going to call in this talk climbing the first mountain what is the first mountain climbing the first mountain is trying to answer the question what makes me significant how can I support myself who will go with me it's the act of winning some success getting a reputation for being good at your job winning some praise and recognition it's about admiring and acquiring the first mountain our lives is about establishing an identity creating boundary markers seeking security and linking yourself to significant projects and causes one of the nice descriptions of the first mountain is written by a hero of mine George Orwell he wrote an essay called why I write and he was very honest why is he writing one sheer egotism I want to seem clever I want to get talked about to aesthetic enthusiasm perception of beauty pleasure of the words take some pleasure in the job you do three historical impulse the desire to see the world accurately forth political purpose just want to shift the world a little in the way I'd like it to shift fifth making some money six getting invited to the inner rings of society earning your way to Aspen and these are the sorts of things we do on our first mountain and one of the things about the first mountain a lot of it depends on how people are perceiving you other people's judgments of you make a big difference to how well you think you're doing as a one psychologist wrote the world is an encoded message to me a statement about me about how I am valued and how I am to comport myself I am what happens or happens to me and so that's the first mountain there's nothing wrong with it we all want to build success somebody I wrote said there are four levels of happiness there's material pleasure which is having a nice car nice food nice X there's comparative happiness ego comparative happiness which is about status winning victories making your mark in the world there's generativity the pleasure you get giving back to the community and forth there's transcendence the joy you feel from being connected to unconditional love truth justice and home the first mountain is about one and two and there's nothing wrong with you of those things but I think we all know that the things you seek in the first mountain are not quite fulfilling those first two happiness's and that's because you can never be wholly focused to be at peace to be really happy is to be wholehearted on the first mountain you can never be seriously wholehearted because you've always got one eye on your conception of yourself and how other people are seeing you and so yourself gets in the way of being wholehearted into something else and so that brings us to the sixth phase in life which David rarely talked about earlier this week which is the valley phase you get atop your first mountain and you think not quite satisfying or on the climb tier 4 up your first mountain you fail and you get knocked off your Mountain or some life event that happens that throws you off the mountain maybe the death of a child an illness that brings you to the brink of your grave and then you get a sensation that all your life somehow is not that this is not actually your Mountain there's some crisis here that you can't solve on this mountain with your current skill set that are required for that mountain and so the classic case of a guy who realized that his first mountain was the wrong Mountain was leo tolstoy and it happened in him in midlife but I want to emphasize when I talk about these phases life can happen at any time some people hit their valley and 20 or at 74 Tolstoy it was about in his 30s he in his first Mountain want to be a great writer he did pretty well wrote Anna Karenina war and peace pretty good but he found it all meaningless at a certain point he wrote the only faith I had was faith in perfection this is a passage that resonates completely with my students I but I could not have said what perfection consisted of or what its purpose might be I tried to achieve intellectual perfection I studied everything I could everything that life gave me a chance to study I tried to perfect my will and set up rules for myself that I endeavored to follow I strove for physical perfection by doing all the exercises to develop strength and agility and by undergoing all the hardships that discipline of endurance and perseverance could reside I took all this to be perfection the starting of it all was moral perfection but this was soon replaced by belief an overall perfection the desire to be better not in only in my own eyes but in the eyes of other people and so he was trying to be a perfect person that's the first mountain but he began to realize that he was trying to be come this writer was going to change the world he began to have a little loss of a little faith in the other writers they didn't seem so great then his brother died in agonizing death without ever understanding why he had lived and died and then he went to Paris and in Paris he saw an execution and he wrote when I saw how the head was severed from the body and heard the thud of each part as it fell into a box I understood not with my intellect but with my whole being that no theories of rationality of existence or progress could justify such an act I realized that if all the people in the world from the day of creation found this to be necessary according to whatever theory I knew that it was not necessary and that it was wrong therefore my judgments must be based on what is right and necessary and not on what people say and do that is to say he became aware the truth is transcendent there are some things that are just wrong and there are some things that are right beyond the realm of society beyond the realm of culture beyond the realm of norms there's something universal but a manual Cahn calls the moral law within and when the sense that there was something transcendently true or false he came to see all his desires on this world other than finding what was true and false were unnecessary he wrote my life came to a stop but there was no life in me I had no desire whose satisfaction I would have found reasonable if I wanted something I knew beforehand it did not matter whether I got it or not all that mattered was finding the transcendent truth so he grew sick of life he put ropes aside he put guns aside because he didn't want to kill himself and as he thought about it he was he realized that the rational knowledge that he had built up all his life the goal of worldly perfection that he had built up all his life was not the right goal I was inevitably led to recognize a different type of knowledge and a rational type which all of humanity has had faith faith which provides us with the possibility of living wherever there is life there's faith since the origin of mankind has made it possible for us to live the main characteristics of faith are everywhere and the same so we found a new set of desires to lead a simple life to go down into himself and to he found a faith the Christian faith so he went down into his Valley and the paradox of the valley is you see more from the bottom of the valley than you do from the top Paul Tillich the 1950s theologian said when you're in those moments of suffering when you're down in your valley you're reintroduced to yourself and you're reminded you not you're not who you thought you were what moments of suffering does is they carve what he's what till it called a hole in the what you thought was the basement of your soul and they reveal a cavity below and they reveal a cavity below that so in those moments of suffering I don't know if you I'm sure we've all had them we've all felt them you see that there are pieces of yourself further down than you knew existed and then the next thought that comes to you is well how can I fill those pieces I'm a deeper person than I ever thought I was how can I get the joy that will satisfy the inner pieces and that's basically what Tolstoy had he was living in this world he became aware of a transcendence he became aware of a hunger which was not a material hunger or even a heart hunger butch was so hunger and he then said how can I find that kind of pleasure that will fill that piece of myself and that to get to our seventh phase as when you get to the seventh mountain and that's in theory what this whole talk is supposed to be about or leading up to when you get to that second mountain you have a new set of desires you come to the realize that first mountain was nice maybe I'll go back there and struggle for success and money and reputation all this but this is my real mountain the first mountain is sort of external it's about external things the second mountain is more internal the first mountain is about admiring and acquiring the second mountain is about pouring forth into something else the first mountain solidifies the ego so you have a stable sense of self the second mountain is defeating the ego the first mountain is elitist climbing the second mountain is egalitarian going down the first mountain is getting apt to Aspen the second is about taking what you have and taking going out into the world the first is about level one of two of happiness material pleasure and status the second is about level three and for happiness generativity giving back and transcendence and so what you reach this point in your life where you have the advantages of sort of knowing who you are maybe having some financial security and you're really now ready for the big risks Karl Barth wrote the sowing is behind now is the time to reap the run has been taken now is the time to leap preparation has been made now is the time for the venture of the work itself and in your second mountain you have some of the structures of rehearse mountain there's an enunciation moment maybe at the bottom of some moment of suffering or some nice moment we think and I really pour like warm myself into this act of service this school this community this person this cause and then there's an initiation process you need somebody even on the second Mountain some institution to lead you to your higher self I was one of the nicest things that happened to me this year a lot of nice things happened to me this year but maybe fifth or sixth I was on the show I hope some of you have listened to Krista Tippett show and I've only done it twice and I did it seven years ago and I did it this year and after the show Krista Tippett said to me you're so different I've never seen anybody change so much and that was a nice moment in my life because I think it meant I was at least getting to the bottom of my second mountain and I had the fortune of having an initiator I got married seven weeks ago she's sitting somewhere over there and my wife and has this to show that life is never formulaic she did her second Mountain first and so when it comes to the spiritual depth the spiritual growth the emotional resilience the emotional outpouring she's become my mentor and my leader in that and Augustine said you'll be ought to be careful about what you love but you because you become what you love well I hope so and so you begin to think about and I've begun to think about the second mountain what does it look like it involves that initiation that Annunciation they that you're on it but it also involves relinquishing things there's a Franciscan monk named Richard Rohr who says when you're on your second Mountain you've got to say farewell to your loyal soldier your loyal soldier was the guy who got you up the first mountain and one of the features of loyal soldier was his genial and accommodating he wants to please everybody psychologist James Hollins says the accommodating reflex so necessary for the adaptational child requires a daily sacrifice of integrity as an adult that need to please which was useful on the way up the first mountain destroys your integrity as an adult then there's an embrace that the world on the second mountain is more enchanted than anything on the first mountain it's you're not just living in prosaic reality here's Hollis that psychologists again we learn in this part of life that life is much riskier more powerful more mysterious than we had ever thought possible while we are rendered more uncomfortable by this discovery it is humbling the world is more magical less predictable more autonomous less controllable more varied less simple more infinite less knowable more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined or been able to tolerate when we are young and so there's an idea that the world is the kind of classic realities and kind of classic there's a myth there spirit there's emotion it's not only about intellect but also about heart and soul you learn also that on your second Mountain the techniques you use get up the first mountain suddenly don't work here often it's the reverse techniques not mastery but obedience to something else not being loud but being silent one writer wrote for the greatest things in life are accomplished in silence not in the clamor and display of superficial event fulness but in the deep clarity of inner vision in the almost imperceptible start of a decision when you climb the first mountain you're using an economic logic input least output effort leads to reward but when you're in a second Mountain you're using a moral logic which is filled with inversions you have to give to receive the after surrender to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself you have to conquer your desire to get with you crave and you have to fulfill yourself you have to forget yourself and so the second mountain is filled with a different spirit now what does it look like well some people and we all know them they go to Tibet and they start meditating and there's nothing wrong with that I'm and in fact it's true if you look at the lives of most of the great spiritual leaders in the traditions whether it's Buddha Abraham Joseph Moses Jesus the Hindu sadhus they left town they went out they just got out of town and they went somewhere far away and so some people when they say they're on their second round they go totally far away some people have an experience that changes them and puts them on their and well Mountain almost against their will and so one of the things you notice about a lot of people who've been to prison especially writers who've been to prison they left they left their first Mountain they were dragged into prison they came out fundamentally different you think of Dostoyevsky Solzhenitsyn Mandela Havel Viktor Frankl if you saw a Pheo Padnos earlier this week and what happens is when they go into prison they discover that all the material things they had in their first Mountain were taken away and they discovered it didn't really hurt all that much and they discovered that the the stuff that's inside is actually the reality they want to cultivate Viktor Frankl was a psychologist in the 30s he was taken to Auschwitz and he realized you know all my life I've been asking what do I want from life and then he realized hey I mean I'm sure it's this wasn't really it but this is what life was asking of me and so he said listen I'm here in Auschwitz I'm a psychologist I'm going to study suffering and so he did a study of suffering and he asked the question why do some people die after a month here but some people live for years here and he discovered that those who survived had made a loving commitment to something outside the camp's one of Franklin's friends in the camps said to him one day listen if I don't get back to my wife and if you should see her again then tell her that I have talked of her daily and hourly second tell her I've loved her more than anyone third the short time I've been married to her outweighs everything even all we have gone through here and what Frankel discovered and he wrote this book which I hope a lot of you read man search for meaning which is that this second Mountain this search for meaning is the fulfilling search and he found a woman who was dying on a nursery on a bed in the nursery or infirmary and she told him I am grateful fate has hit me so hard in my former life I was spoiled and I did not take spiritual accomplishment seriously and in the in the on the bed she'd only one person or one thing living things she could speak to and that was a small chestnut tree out her window and she said this tree is the only friend I have here I often speak to this tree and Franco said to her well does the street does the tree ever talk back to you and she said yes it talks to me and he said what what does it say and she said the tree says to me I am Here I am Here I am life I'm eternal life and that's a sense of transcendent connection even while everything else has been taken away and she's just stuck there on a bed and so prisoners often go through that and you see people who have had it taken away some people are in their second Mountain they just stay in the spot they were but they do it differently a legend and one of the pillars of this community is a woman named Linda Resnick with her husband Stuart she owns all the pistachios you've been eating this week the palm juices the Fiji water and so she was in the Central Valley of California and she was she and her husband Stuart were farming and they were making all these very fine products and now what she does is she creates schools there medical centers there community centers there camps and playgrounds it's the same spot she always knew but shall she is pouring herself not taking only taking stuff out of the ground there but pouring herself into the people who do the farming there and when you see lure Linda and Stuart and you talk to them about this they can barely talk about their actual business they want to talk about the health centers and these are people who are in their second mountain and there's a fire and purity and goodness in their eyes that you can see is totally fulfilling and that's an example of people who stayed where they were but they do it differently my friend David Bradley here in the front row owns the Atlantic a fine publication second best publication in the country and if you saw I'm speaking but he also frees hostages from the Middle East and that's a bit of David second Mountain Lincoln who's the classic guy who was on the second mountain while staying in the same job stayed in politics but if you want to know the humiliation the humility the surrender and the grace of somebody who has achieved a spiritual depth read the second inaugural when Lincoln was fighting the civil war his general was general McClellan and Lincoln wanted McClellan to fight a little harder and he wanted the cloven to come in and have a meeting but McClellan wouldn't come into the White House so Lincoln went to McClellan's house and he went into the living room when he sat down and the butler said monsura general McClellan is out and Lincoln said okay I'll wait so I waited a little while McClellan came in the back door and went up to his room and the butler said he's come in he may be tired but he'll change and go see you Lincoln waits there for 45 minutes and finally the butler comes down and this Butler says I'm sorry general McCullen is too tired to see you so this guy's the president United States sitting in the living room and he was with his assistant John Hay and said this is outrage he's insulting you and Lincoln said I'll sit here all day if I can get him to fight harder and that's a man who had put his ego aside and it was an act of service and obedience and so what you see in a lot of people they've made the same four commitments the same marriage the same job the same faith the same town but they're committed stead of trying to master their commitments the commitments have become their master and their commitments have proven them to be the kind of people they have to be and I think this is part of the process of being on your second Mountain the penultimate thing I'll mention is what I'll call leaving Aspen and let me be clear exactly what I mean because there's nothing wrong with Aspen but to get here and to build a life that makes you comfortable here and to thrive here you have to learn certain rules certain ways of comporting yourself certain ways of behaving certain ways of networking certain ways of relating to one another and I happen to notice on this mountain that if somebody introduces a personal note into a conversation within two minutes somebody else will turn it into a public note as say if somebody says something intimate people get a little nervous about that it's sort of a social violation so we want to talk about global warming and we're more comfortable when talking to each other about talking about public affairs than affairs of the heart and that's because we a lot of our certain professions were a little emotionally detached and I think to really succeed in the second Mountain you have to get out of this community into communities where you can't get away with that and it happened to me I'm involved in the community where I have dinner every Thursday with a bunch of 22 24 year old kids from DC and the first day I went into this community of kids there may be 20 or 30 of them at a dinner any given time and I met a kid named ed and I held up my hand to shake his hand and he said we don't really shake hands here we hug here and so you embraced me a hug and all the kids embraced me a hug I've been going back almost every Thursday for three years and I can't get away with my old crap and what they give to us is a complete intolerance of social distance they force you to get into the intimate relationship building business and frankly I went with Lind out to the Central Valley into the preschools into the hospitals and a lot of people out there mostly let's you know they force you into a second intimacy and they force you to open your heart to get out of the comfortable ways you're doing and to actually dance in public and they give you in the second mountain I think when you go through that process the ego is overthrown you're not at stake anymore you get the pleasure of gift love of agape which is the unconditional willing of good for the other the equal regard for the well-being of the other the passionate service and open sacrifice for the sake of the other when you look at people and you're there further down the second mountain they had just had this radiant inner light my favorite example I was in Frederick Maryland with a bunch of ladies aged probably 60 to 80 who teach immigrants English and how to read they just read either patients goodness kindness they made you feel better about yourself and there's a certain sort of joy in that and so when you look at these people they just radiate joyfulness so I'm going to end by just talking about what joy is the thing we're all shooting for at the end of the day first the first thing when you think about joy it's moving in unison with other people at every celebration in every society when they're doing when they're celebrating they're doing rhythmic dance they're dancing around the fire they're dancing in the synagogue hall they're dancing at a party movement with others one of my professors at Chicago is a guy named William McNeil and McNeil experienced that joy while he was serving the army in World War two he wrote words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved a sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall more specifically a strange sense of perverse enlargement a sort of swelling out becoming bigger than life thanks to participation in a collective ritual the second thing joy consists of is that kind of group movement in pursuit of an ideal into pursuit of something that satisfies our moral yearning a few more quotations this is from rabbi wolf Kelman who was marching to Selma with Martin Luther King we felt connected in song to the transcendental the inevitable we felt triumphant celebration we felt that things change for the good and nothing is congealed forever that was the warmest transcendental spiritual experience meaning and purpose and mission were beyond exact words meaning was the feeling the song the movement the overwhelming spiritual fulfillment when you think of joy it's the place where people meet it's the place where a part of yourself merges with something outside yourself the poet David white joy is a meeting place of deep intentionality and self-forgetting the bodily alchemy of what license died in communion with what formerly seemed to be outside dance laughter affection skin touching skin singing in the car music in the kitchen the companion bill presence of a daughter the sheer intoxicating beauty of the world inhabited as an edge between what we had previously thought was us and we thought was other than us becomes one and that's the nice wearing down of boundaries and this is what you think you see when you see people sort of at the peak of their second mountain it's not that their desires have been satisfied but they're all desire it's not I want it's just pure wants they found something that's truly meaningful to them and truly important to them and the self has been left behind and they just longed to be more and more serving that thing one of my heroes is Saint Agustin who lived 1,500 years ago and he said late have I loved you a beauty so ancient and so new late have I loved you lo before you were within but I was outside seeking you outside and upon the safely things you have made I rushed headlong misshapen you are with me but I was not with you they held me back from far from you those things which would have no being were they not in you you called shouted broke through my deafness you flared blazed banished my blindness you lavish the fragrance I gasped and now I pant for you I tasted you and now I hunger and thirst you touched me and I burn for your peace I think that's what you see in people when they're at the top of the second mountain something they love has lavished them with it's fragrance and they gasp some commitment they've made makes them hunger to fulfill it there's some faithfulness is something they really care about that they want to live out and that's the second mountain thank you [Applause]

Channel: The Aspen Institute

Views: 64,234

Rating: 4.7470589 out of 5

Keywords: David Brooks, NYTimes, Editorial, Aspen Ideas Festival, Aspen Institute

Id: PertBYAnQok

Length: 50min 52sec (3052 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 01 2017