The Second Mountain

The Second Mountain — summary

The janitor who cleaned the room twice

A father has been sitting beside his comatose son's hospital bed for six months. He stepped out for a smoke. While he was gone, a janitor named Luke came in and cleaned the room. When the father returned, he didn't see the cleaning. He erupted. He yelled at Luke for being lazy, for not doing his job, for letting his son lie in filth. Luke could have defended himself. He could have said, "Sir, I just cleaned this whole room. You stepped outside." Instead, he picked up his bucket, picked up his rag, and cleaned the room a second time. Years later, when an interviewer asked him why, Luke said something simple: "I cleaned it so that he could see me cleaning it. I can understand how he could be."

That story, which David Brooks borrows from a book called *Practical Wisdom*, is the seed of *The Second Mountain*. Almost everyone you meet in adult life is climbing one of two mountains. On the first, you build yourself. You earn a degree, land the job, hit the income target, get the partner who looks good on paper, accumulate a self that other people respect. On the second, you give yourself away. You decide that the cause matters more than the credit, that a person in pain matters more than the dignity of being right. Luke is on the second mountain. Most of us spend our twenties and thirties on the first one and don't even know there's another one to climb.

This book is about the journey between them. It asks three questions a 25-year-old, a 40-year-old, and a 60-year-old all need to answer: why does first-mountain success leave so many people hollow, what kind of suffering pushes a person off the first mountain, and what does a life rooted in commitment actually look like day to day. Brooks writes as a smart cousin who's been to therapy and read a lot of theology. He's also, as we'll see, a man who climbed the first mountain very high and then fell off it spectacularly in his late fifties. His failures are part of why the book is worth reading.