a common origin story. They nurture thick relationships and demand full commitment. They don’t merely educate; they transform.
THE PLAN
The first purpose of this book is to show how individuals move from the first to the second mountain, to show what that kind of deeper and more joyful life looks like, step-by-step and in concrete detail. Everybody says you should serve a cause larger than yourself, but nobody tells you how.
The second purpose is to show how societies can move from the first to the second mountain. This is ultimately a book about renewal, how things that are divided and alienated can find new wholeness. Our society suffers from a crisis of connection, a crisis of solidarity. We live in a culture of hyper-individualism. There is always a tension between self and society, between the individual and the group. Over the past sixty years we have swung too far toward the self. The only way out is to rebalance, to build a culture that steers people toward relation, community, and commitment—the things we most deeply yearn for, yet undermine with our hyper-individualistic way of life.
In the first section I’m going to give a fuller account of how the two-mountain life happens. I’ll take us up the slope of the first mountain, down the back slope into the valley, and then up the second mountain. Please don’t take this metaphor too literally. There is, of course, no one formula that covers how all lives happen. (My wife, for example, seems to have climbed her second mountain first. Unlike most of us, she was raised in an environment that emphasized moral commitment, not individual success.) I’m using this two-mountain metaphor to render in narrative form two different moral ethoses by which people can live—a life lived for self and a life lived as a gift for others. I want to show how this first mode, which is common in our culture, doesn’t satisfy. I’ll describe some of the experiences people have on their way to more fulfilling lives, and share the important truths they discover. Most of us get better at living, get deeper and wiser as we go, and this book seeks to capture how that happens.
In the second half of the book, I’ll describe how people live with a second-mountain mentality. People on the first mountain have lives that are mobile and lightly attached. People on the second mountain are deeply rooted and deeply committed. The second-mountain life is a committed life. When I’m describing how second-mountain people live, what I’m really describing is how these people made maximal commitments to others and how they live them out in fervent, all-in ways. These people are not keeping their options open. They are planted. 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. In this second section of this book I will try to describe commitment making: how people are called by a vocation and then live it out; how they decide who to marry and thrive in marriage; how they come up with their philosophy of life and how they experience faith; how they are seized by a desire to serve their community; and how they work with others to help their communities prosper. The fulfillment of our lives depends on how well we choose and live out those sometimes clashing commitments.
Some of the people I’ll be describing in these pages lived their lives at a very high level. Realistically, you and I are not going to live as self-sacrificially as they did. We’ll fall short because we’re ordinary human beings, and we’re still going to be our normal self-centered selves more than we care to admit. But it is still important to set a high standard. It is still important to be inspired by the examples of others and to remember that a life of deep commitments is possible. When we fall short, it will be because of our own limitations, not because we had an inadequate ideal.
WHAT I’VE LEARNED
The first- and second-mountain distinction might sound a little like the résumé virtues versus eulogy virtues distinction I made in my last book, The Road to Character. And now I should confess that I’m writing this book in