David Brooks

Some people seem to have been born into this world with a sense of indebtedness for the blessing of being alive. They are aware of the transmission of generations, what has been left to them by those who came before, their indebtedness to their ancestors, their obligations to a set of moral responsibilities that stretch across time.

As the theologian Lisa Fullam has put it, ‘Humility is a virtue of self-understanding in context, acquired by the practice of other centeredness.’

People with character are capable of a long obedience in the same direction, of staying attached to people and causes and callings consistently through thick and thin.

Your ability to discern your vocation depends on the condition of your eyes and ears, whether they are sensitive enough to understand the assignment your context is giving you.

No good life is possible unless it is organized around a vocation. ... A vocation is not found by looking within and finding your passion. It is found by looking without and asking what life is asking of us. What problem is addressed by an activity you intrinsically enjoy?

If you act well, eventually you will become good. Change your behavior and eventually you rewire your brain.

The purpose of the struggle against sin and weakness is not to ‘win.’ Because that is not possible; it is to get better at waging it.

The genius of this conception is that as people become more dependent on God, their capacity for ambition and action increases. Dependency doesn’t breed passivity; it breeds energy and accomplishment

Some activity or some injustice has called to the deepest level of your nature and demanded an active response. Carl Jung called a vocation ‘an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths. . . . Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: He is called.

‘The secret of life,’ the sculptor Henry Moore once said, ‘is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of every day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.’

‘One is apt to think of moral failure as due to weakness of character,’ the British educator Sir Richard Livingstone wrote. ‘More often it is due to an inadequate ideal.’ So one job of a teacher was, in this educational model, to hold up exemplars. ‘I make honorable things pleasant to children,’ a Spartan educator put it. When the students emerged from school they would have had at least some contact with the best things human beings have thought and done.

‘Good people will mirror goodness in us, which is why we love them so much, Richard Rohr writes. ‘Not-so-mature people will mirror their own unlived and confused lives onto us.’

When making a commitment decision, defining the purpose of your life is the biggest part of the problem. That’s a matter of the ultimate horizon. The question What is my ultimate good? is a different kind of question than How can I win at Monopoly?

But if you aren’t saying a permanent no to anything, giving anything up, then you probably aren’t diving into anything fully. A life of commitment means saying a thousand noes for the sake of a few precious yeses.

The best adult life is lived by making commitments: commitments to a vocation, to a family, to a philosophy or faith, to a community. Adult life is about making promises to others, being faithful to those promises. The beautiful life is found in the mutual giving of unconditional gifts.

Comparison is the robber of joy.

‘Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man’s attitude toward history and nature,’ Rabbi Heschel writes in God in Search of Man. ‘One attitude is alien to his spirit: taking things for granted.’ There are holy sparks in every occasion and a cosmic universe in every person.

Their days are often exhausting, because they have put themselves out for people, and those people fill their days with requests and demands. But they are living at a fuller amplitude, activating deeper parts of themselves and taking on broader responsibilities. They have decided that, as C.S. Lewis put it, ‘The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.’

The first mountain is about building up the ego and defining the self, the second mountain is about shedding the ego and losing the self. If the first mountain is about acquisition, the second mountain is about contribution. If the first mountain is elitist—moving up—the second mountain is egalitarian—planting yourself amid those in need, and walking arm in arm with them.