knees, as it were, and gained admittance into the freer region that lay beyond. In this respect, it was like death. And, as with death, too, it was good to have gone through it. No otherwise could I have rid myself of a thousand follies, fripperies, prejudices, habits, and other such worldly dust as inevitably settles upon the crowd along the broad highway.”
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. Most of us need an earthquake to push us into that fortunate fall. Our job now is to be defeated by ever grander things. It is to trust in life and surrender to the callings that will catch us and show us the way.
You don’t have to be in control. You don’t have to impress the world. You’ve got the skill you earned on the first mountain and the wisdom you earned in the valley, and now is the time to take the big risk. “The sowing is behind; now is the time to reap,” the theologian Karl Barth writes. “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.”
In 1849, a young Fyodor Dostoyevsky experienced his valley and the beginning of his recovery in a single moment. He had been imprisoned in Saint Petersburg with a group of other revolutionaries and sentenced to die. The men were marched out into a square in their burial shrouds. The firing squad gathered, and the drums sounded. Death was seconds away. Then, at that instant, by prearranged plan, a messenger arrived on horseback. The execution was to be stayed by the clemency of the czar. The original sentences would apply—hard labor.
One man broke down crying, singing out “Long live the czar!” Another went mad. Dostoyevsky was brought back to his cell and suddenly was overcome with joy. “I cannot recall when I was ever as happy as on that day,” he later recalled. “I walked up and down my cell…and sang the whole time, sang at the top of my voice, so happy at being given back my life!”
He immediately wrote a letter to his brother: “And only then did I know how much I loved you my dear brother!” All the small questions that used to concern him fell away. “When I look back on my past and think how much time I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul—then my heart bleeds.”
His life, he felt, would begin again. “Never has there seethed in me such an abundant and healthy kind of spiritual life as now….Now my life will change, I shall be born again in new form….Life is a gift. Life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness….Life is everywhere, life is in ourselves, not in the exterior.”
Most of us don’t get marched in front of a firing squad and then pardoned. Most of us learn the lesson Dostoyevsky learned gradually, over seasons of suffering, often in the wilderness. The lesson is that the things we had thought were most important—achievement, affirmation, intelligence—are actually less important, and the things we had undervalued—heart and soul—are actually most important.
Maybe some of us will learn these lessons while racking up success after success, or just being thoroughly loved, but for most of us the process is different: We have a season when we chase the shallow things in life. We are not fulfilled. Then comes hardship, which exposes the heart and soul. The heart and soul teach us that we cannot give ourselves what we desire most. Fulfillment and