Kathy and David are exhausted a lot of the time, as you can imagine. Maybe you are a parent trying to look after two or three kids; imagine what a day is like intertwined with forty. One of the kids has just lost a cellphone or smashed his bike. Sometimes real crises hit. In 2018, Kathy and David had to race against time after Medicaid refused to pay for a kidney transplant for one of the young women. Everybody mobilized to get Medicaid to reverse their decision, which it did. Fortunately, we had a donor. David gave one of his kidneys to Madeline.
The exhaustion comes with its compensations. Kathy and David are now enmeshed in dozens of loving relationships. They sometimes ask themselves if there is a better way to do the work they do, but they don’t have to ask themselves if they are doing anything valuable with their lives. They know. After you have fallen in love with Kesari or James or Koleco, Taruq and Thalya, it’s not even a question. These are young people of infinite depth and promise. The chance to be with them is just what you do.
To me, AOK is what the second-mountain life looks like. It is a life of love, care, and commitment. It is the antidote to much that is wrong in our culture.
THE WEAVERS
I now get to spend a lot of time around people like Kathy and David, thanks to my Aspen Institute program, Weave: The Social Fabric Project. The first idea behind the effort was that social isolation is a core problem that underlies a lot of other social problems. The second idea was that across the nation there are people who are building healthy communities. We have a lot to learn from such people.
We travel around the country and meet people who are restoring social capital and healing lives. These people are everywhere. We are a nation of healers. We at Weave drop into a small town, and it is not a problem to find thirty-five people who completely fit the mold.
There’s Jade Bock in Albuquerque, who lost her dad when she was young and now helps children process grief. There’s Stephanie Hruzek in Houston, who runs an after-school kids’ program and who plays with them hour after hour—a fervent believer that an hour spent in play with a child is the most important purposeless hour you will ever spend. “I am broken,” Stephanie says. “I need other people to survive.” There’s Sam Jones, who has run an amateur boxing ring in southeastern Ohio, where, for no fee, he coaches young men, nominally in boxing but really about life.
Over the course of 2018, I probably met between five hundred and one thousand of these people. Almost without exception, they have what Kathy and David have: vocational certitude. They are poorly paid and often feel ignored; their small acts of care often go unrewarded by the larger status systems of our society. But they find joy in the light they bring others, and they know why they have been put on this earth. “This is not a job I’ll retire from,” says Sharon Murphy, who runs Mary House, a refugee-housing organization in Washington. “I love what I do. This kind of work is a way of being.”
They can seem very altruistic. But it’s worth remembering, as Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out, that the concept of altruism was invented only in the eighteenth century. Once people decided that human nature is essentially egoist and selfish, then it was necessary to invent a word for when people weren’t driven by selfish desires. But before that, what we call altruism—living for relationships—was just how people lived. It wasn’t heroic or special.
There are many kinds of second-mountain people—men and women whose lives are defined by deep commitments. There are such people in business, in teaching, the arts, the military. But, because of my work with Weave, I’ve gotten to know the ones in the nonprofit world best. They are standing athwart the culture of individualism and isolation. Their daily activities are in contact with their ultimate ends.
Spending time around such people has been an education. I’d like to describe them for a bit to give a sense of what the second-mountain life looks like and what values people on that mountain tend to share. I’ll put the key commonalities in italics.
THEIR VALLEYS
Most of the people I’ve met through Weave have had some sort of valley