She works at a free healthcare clinic and is working to open a new one. She is an example of someone who has suffered the worst life can throw at you and is permanently affected by it. But she has come out with a ferocious desire to serve.
“I grew from this experience because I was angry,” she says. “I was going to fight back against what he tried to do to me by making a difference in the world. See, he didn’t kill me. My response to him is whatever you meant to do to me, fuck you, you’re not going to do it to me.” Her motivation is part defiance against her husband, part love for the people in front of her.
MORAL MOTIVATION
That is the thing you notice about second-mountain people. There’s been a motivational shift. Their desires have been transformed. If you wanted to generalize a bit, you could say there 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.
Social science and much of our modern thinking tends to emphasize the first two desires. We often assume that self-interest—defined as material gain and status recognition—are the main desires of life and that service to others is the icing on the cake. And that’s because for centuries most of our social thinking has been shaped by men, who went out and competed in the world while women largely stayed home and did the caring. These men didn’t even see the activity that undergirded the political and economic systems they spent their lives studying. But when you actually look around the world—parents looking after their kids, neighbors forming associations, colleagues helping one another, people meeting and encountering each other in coffee shops—you see that loving care is not on the fringe of society. It’s the foundation of society.
These community builders are primarily driven by desires four through six—by emotional, spiritual, and moral motivations: a desire to live in intimate relation with others, to make a difference in the world, to feel right with oneself. They are driven by a desire for belonging and generosity.
They exhibit bright sadness. I get the phrase from the Franciscan friar Richard Rohr and his great book Falling Upward, which is about finding meaning in middle age and beyond. When you are serving those in need you see pain and injustice close up. The closer you get to wisdom, Rohr continues, the more of your own shadow you see, and the more of other people’s shadow, and the more you realize how much we need each other. Hope gets infused with realistic awareness. “There is a gravitas in the second half of life,” Rohr writes, “but it is now held up by a much deeper lightness, or ‘okayness.’ Our mature years are characterized by a bright sadness and a sober happiness, if that makes any sense.”
I once asked my New York Times readers whether they had found purpose in their lives. Thousands wrote back to describe their experiences. One in particular sticks out and illustrates Rohr’s concept of bright sadness and okayness. Greg Sunter from Brisbane, Australia, wrote:
Four years ago, my wife of 21 years passed away as the result of a brain tumor. Her passage from diagnosis to death was less than 6 months. As shocking as that time was, almost as shocking was the sense of personal growth and awakened understanding that has come from the experience for me through reflection and inner work—to a point that I feel almost guilty about how significant my own growth has been as a result of my wife’s death.
In his book A Hidden Wholeness, Parker Palmer writes about the two ways in which our hearts can be broken: the first imagining the heart as shattered and scattered; the second imagining the heart broken open into new capacity, holding more of both our own and the world’s suffering and joy, despair and hope. The image of the heart broken open has become the driving force of my life in the years since my wife’s death. It has become the purpose to my life.