0812983416
David Brooks
Notes
Truly humble people are engaged in a great effort to magnify what is best in themselves and defeat what is worst, to become strong in the weak places.
The central fallacy of modern life is the belief that accomplishments of the Adam I realm can produce deep satisfaction. That’s false. Adam I’s desires are infinite and always leap out ahead of whatever has just been achieved. Only Adam II can experience deep satisfaction.
In this method, you don’t ask, What do I want from life? You ask a different set of questions: What does life want from me? What are my circumstances calling me to do? In this scheme of things we don’t create our lives; we are summoned by life. The important answers are not found inside, they are found outside. The perspective begins not within the autonomous self, but with the concrete circumstances in which you happen to be embedded…“It did not really matter what we expected from life, (Frankl) wrote, “but rather what life expected from us. We need to stop asking the meaning of life, and instead think of ourselves as those who are being questioned by life – daily and hourly.”
…one day (Dwight Eisenhower) quit (smoking) cold turkey: “I simply gave myself an order.”… “Freedom,” he would later say in his 1957 State of the Union address, “has been defined as the opportunity for self-discipline.”
We sometimes think of saints, or of people who are living like saints, as being ethereal, living in a higher spiritual realm. But often enough they live in a less ethereal way than the rest of us. They are more fully of this earth, more fully engaged in the dirty, practical problems of the people around them.
We are called at certain moments to comfort people who are enduring some trauma. Many of us don’t know how to react in such situations, but others do. In the first place, they just show up. They provide a ministry of presence. Next, they don’t compare.The sensitive person understands that each person’s ordeal is unique and should not be compared to anyone else’s. Next, they do the practical things – making lunch, dusting the room, washing the towels. Finally, they don’t try to minimize what is going on. They don’t attempt to reassure with false, saccharine sentiments. They don’t say that the pain is all for the best. They don’t search for silver linings. They do what wise souls do in the presence of tragedy and trauma. They practice a passive activism. They don’t bustle about trying to solve something that cannot be solved. The sensitive person grants the sufferer the dignity of her own process. She lets the sufferer define the meaning of what is going on. She just sits simply through the nights of pain and darkness, being practical, human, simple, and direct.
Life is not like navigating through an open field. It is committing oneself to a few institutions that were embedded on the ground before you were born and will be here after you die. It is accepting the gifts of the dead, taking on the responsibility of persevering and improving an institution and then transmitting that institution, better, on to the next generation.
By the fall of 1945, people around the world had endured sixteen years of deprivation – first during the Depression, then during the war. They were ready to let loose, to relax, to enjoy. Consumption and advertising took off as people rushed to the store to buy things that would make life easier and more fun. People in the postwar years wanted to escape from the shackles of self-restraint and all those gloomy subjects like sin and depravity. They were ready to put the horrors of the Holocaust and the war behind them. – On shift from moral realism to moral romanticism.
Humility Code
- We don’t live for happiness.
- We are flawed creatures.
- We have capacity to struggle with ourselves.
- …you are not the center of the universe, but you serve a larger order.
- Pride deludes us into thinking we are the authors of our life.
- No external conflict is as consequential or as dramatic as the inner campaign against our own deficiencies.
- If you behave with habitual self-discipline, you will become constant and dependable.
- Defeating weakness often means quieting the self.
- The humble person has an acute historical consciousness.
- 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.
- (Maturity) is earned not by being better than other people at something, but by being better than you used to be.
A Serious Call To A Devout And Holy Life.