Happiness spills over

      I closed my May 19 post on happiness and joy with a reference to David Brooks’s new book The Second Mountain, which is a follow-up to his highly successful 2015 offering The Road to Character (also from Random House).

      The first of these books focused on the people we occasionally meet who possess an impressive inner cohesion. There’s nothing about them that is fragmented. They are calm, settled, and rooted. They express humility, restraint, reticence, temperance, respect, and what Brooks calls soft self-discipline.

      The new book is subtitled The Quest for a Moral Life, and as the thoughtful, experienced journalist Brooks has proved himself to be during his sixteen years as a columnist with the Times, he is quick to clarify his metaphorical mountains.

      The first is about building up the ego and defining the self; the second is about shedding the ego and losing the self.

      If the first mountain is about acquisition—elitism, moving up—he explains in a crisp yet comprehensive opening chapter, the second mountain is about contribution—egalitarianism—planting yourself among those in need, and walking arm in arm with them.

On the first mountain, Brooks adds, you tend to be ambitious, strategic, and independent. On the second, relational, intimate, and relentless.

      Brooks’s concern is to show how individuals move from the first to the second mountain, and what the deeper, more joyful life looks like.

      Likewise, how societies can make that move and find renewal and wholeness by rebalancing their lives—building a culture that steers people toward stronger relationships, community, and commitment in marriage, vocation, and in philosophy or faith. 

      With the honesty typical of the best journalists, Brooks admits that he discovered during the writing of Second Mountain that maybe he’s not really a writer but a teacher, or middleman, who takes the curriculum of other people’s knowledge and passes it along.

      To which I would add that he certainly knows how to assemble a great support team, including luminaries such as Leo Tolstoy, C.S.Lewis, Victor Frankl, W.H. Auden, RalphWaldo Emerson, Joseph Campbell, John Steinbeck, Vaclav Havel, Gloria Steinem, Annie Dillard, Richard Rohr, Carl Jung, George Orwell, and Miroslav Wolf.

      Brooks is also honest about his own life, speaking openly about the collapse of his first marriage after twenty-seven years. He admits to his side-stepping of the responsibilities of relationship and to his sins of withdrawal, evasion, workaholism, conflict avoidance, and failure to empathize and express himself openly.

      Yet he climbed out of that valley in time to discover how any of us can be broken open by love, and how the love that he feels and receives from his “incandescent” second wife, Anne, now colors and warms every aspect of his life.

      In a deeply touching moment toward the end, Brooks declares that Second Mountain “has been, and the rest of [his] life will be, warmed and guided by Anne’s light.”

      I’m convinced that these mountain-top revelations will light up many other lives, too—just as they have mine.