About a month ago, my therapist told me he thought I was
beginning to climb my ‘Second Mountain.’
I asked him what he meant by that, and he went on to share with me that he had recently been reading the New York Times journalist and author David Brooks’ new book by the same title: The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, and he felt what I was experiencing in my own psychological (and spiritual) development and maturation might have some similarities to what Mr. Brooks’ depicted in his memoir.
I have yet to read it for myself (currently there is an enormous wait list for it at my public library), but I’ve still been able to lean into the metaphor of a ‘Second Mountain’ to describe this life stage I seem to be moving into all the same.
And it reminded me of another book, part memoir, that I did read five years ago when I was a 36 years-old working mom just returning from maternity leave for my second baby, called Yoga and the Quest for the True Self (1999) by Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health Scholar Emeritus Stephen Cope.
This week, I actually chose to re-read the first chapter titled: “Waking Up is Hard to Do,” and I was struck by how well the chapter depicted where I was at—psychologically and spiritually—at that particular moment when I first read it- even though at the time I probably could not have fully articulated why I chose to pick such a book at my favorite used books store, and it is only now, in hindsight, that it all seems so clear.
I had forgotten too, about all of the references Stephen Cope made to the work of 20th century psychiatrist Carl G. Jung in the first chapter alone, in regard to what Mr. Cope called “the developmental tasks of the second half of life" which I suspect is similar to what David Brooks, or more to the point my therapist, may have been meaning by the metaphor of the "Second Mountain"
In the chapter "Waking Up is Hard to Do" Mr. Cope wrote:
Jung believed that at mid-life, most of us have refined our external selves, what he called the persona, the mask we wear to assure some stable, ongoing sense of identity. In his view, the persona represents only one limited aspect of the personality, and by midlife, most of us are outgrowing it.
I know I certainly was.
Mr. Cope also included some of Jung’s most elegant quotations about these changes or shifts that can occur at the mid-life life stage including this one:
Are there not colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce young people to knowledge of the world? No, thoroughly unprepared we take the step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.
Thoroughly unprepared we take the step…Indeed!
Take right now.
I am a 41 year-old woman who is in many ways making some pretty stereotypical mid-life shifts and changes in her life; which is to say, developmentally right on time as opposed to the sports car or the affair.
Even to the point that one of my most poignant, and it would not be exaggerated to say life-changing, mid-life milestones occurred while I was watching my own heart beat during an echocardiogram (a sonogram of the heart) just after turning 40.
The cardiology test had been recommended after I had come up with an irregular EKG at my routine annual physical, and I ultimately ended up having a whole series of tests after which it was determined that I seemed to just have a quirky heart that draws attention on an EKG.
But before all had been concluded, and as I lay there with all those white stickers all over my body for the 3rd, 4th, and 5th EKG, I found myself developing more and more awareness of my own biological impermanence; my own mortality.
I know most people, in the United States anyway, have enormous difficulty talking about the reality of aging, sickness, and dying without an edge (or a wallop) of anxiety and/or sadness, but for me, in the moments of all those medical tests to check the reliability of my ticker, I actually felt a stronger sense of allegiance and loyalty to my own body—to myself—because I sensed in a profoundly embodied way how much I had taken my own heart for granted.
In some ways, this transformative experience was very much like the poem "Love After Love" by Nobel Prize winning St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott (1930-2017).
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life
But there's more...
This surfacing awareness of my own impermanence, also seemed to break through my own well-defined defense mechanisms and biased perceptions to a much more troublesome reality that I had actually betrayed my own True Self some time ago.
(tavistockrelationships.ac.uk)
Now, as I write about this very specific life experience with a heart monitor a year and a half ago, it might appear to you, the reader, that I’m suggesting that some miraculous out-of-the-blue epiphany occurred right then and there on the exam table, without any direct causes or lead up.
And that is unequivocally not true!
In fact, to stay with the mountain metaphor, I would say that for most of my later 30’s I was already beginning to descend from the first mountain life stage--sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously—in order to detach from, or in some cases dismantle, my concretized False Self.
(youtube)
So the moment with the echocardiogram was merely the punctuation on an chapter in my life that was already winding down.
Though I should say, for me, the False Self was not completely false because I did not feel I was ever doing something that was outside of my value system.
Instead, the False Self for me just felt very limiting, constricting even, because it was only a very partial version or partial truth of my Whole Self that could be summed up as the "Good Girl" archetype, and unfortunatey meant that the much larger, richer whole of me was either being unconsciously suppressed or consciously omitted.
And of course my reasons for living small from the False Self were just like everyone else's (e.g. self-protection, fear of rejection, difficulty with conflict, etc.) because I still did not have the skills or the confidence that I could tolerate and remain equanimous while enduring the negative reactions of the world. So I needed to spend my 30's building up those True Self / Whole Self muscles in order to increase my own resiliency- before it felt safe enough to live from a more expansive truth.
(Brian Andreas)
And now, five years later from when I first read Stephen Cope's book, and many significant life changes later, I find myself coming full circle again as I now embark on my ‘Second Mountain.’
It’s times like these that remind me of that most well-known quote by American-British poet T.S. Elliot (1888-1965) from his work Four Quartets (1943):
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Heard, half-heard, in the stillness between two waves of the sea...
May it be so.
I asked him what he meant by that, and he went on to share with me that he had recently been reading the New York Times journalist and author David Brooks’ new book by the same title: The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, and he felt what I was experiencing in my own psychological (and spiritual) development and maturation might have some similarities to what Mr. Brooks’ depicted in his memoir.
I have yet to read it for myself (currently there is an enormous wait list for it at my public library), but I’ve still been able to lean into the metaphor of a ‘Second Mountain’ to describe this life stage I seem to be moving into all the same.
And it reminded me of another book, part memoir, that I did read five years ago when I was a 36 years-old working mom just returning from maternity leave for my second baby, called Yoga and the Quest for the True Self (1999) by Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health Scholar Emeritus Stephen Cope.
This week, I actually chose to re-read the first chapter titled: “Waking Up is Hard to Do,” and I was struck by how well the chapter depicted where I was at—psychologically and spiritually—at that particular moment when I first read it- even though at the time I probably could not have fully articulated why I chose to pick such a book at my favorite used books store, and it is only now, in hindsight, that it all seems so clear.
I had forgotten too, about all of the references Stephen Cope made to the work of 20th century psychiatrist Carl G. Jung in the first chapter alone, in regard to what Mr. Cope called “the developmental tasks of the second half of life" which I suspect is similar to what David Brooks, or more to the point my therapist, may have been meaning by the metaphor of the "Second Mountain"
In the chapter "Waking Up is Hard to Do" Mr. Cope wrote:
Jung believed that at mid-life, most of us have refined our external selves, what he called the persona, the mask we wear to assure some stable, ongoing sense of identity. In his view, the persona represents only one limited aspect of the personality, and by midlife, most of us are outgrowing it.
I know I certainly was.
Mr. Cope also included some of Jung’s most elegant quotations about these changes or shifts that can occur at the mid-life life stage including this one:
Are there not colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce young people to knowledge of the world? No, thoroughly unprepared we take the step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.
Thoroughly unprepared we take the step…Indeed!
Take right now.
I am a 41 year-old woman who is in many ways making some pretty stereotypical mid-life shifts and changes in her life; which is to say, developmentally right on time as opposed to the sports car or the affair.
Even to the point that one of my most poignant, and it would not be exaggerated to say life-changing, mid-life milestones occurred while I was watching my own heart beat during an echocardiogram (a sonogram of the heart) just after turning 40.
The cardiology test had been recommended after I had come up with an irregular EKG at my routine annual physical, and I ultimately ended up having a whole series of tests after which it was determined that I seemed to just have a quirky heart that draws attention on an EKG.
But before all had been concluded, and as I lay there with all those white stickers all over my body for the 3rd, 4th, and 5th EKG, I found myself developing more and more awareness of my own biological impermanence; my own mortality.
I know most people, in the United States anyway, have enormous difficulty talking about the reality of aging, sickness, and dying without an edge (or a wallop) of anxiety and/or sadness, but for me, in the moments of all those medical tests to check the reliability of my ticker, I actually felt a stronger sense of allegiance and loyalty to my own body—to myself—because I sensed in a profoundly embodied way how much I had taken my own heart for granted.
In some ways, this transformative experience was very much like the poem "Love After Love" by Nobel Prize winning St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott (1930-2017).
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life
But there's more...
This surfacing awareness of my own impermanence, also seemed to break through my own well-defined defense mechanisms and biased perceptions to a much more troublesome reality that I had actually betrayed my own True Self some time ago.
Now, as I write about this very specific life experience with a heart monitor a year and a half ago, it might appear to you, the reader, that I’m suggesting that some miraculous out-of-the-blue epiphany occurred right then and there on the exam table, without any direct causes or lead up.
And that is unequivocally not true!
In fact, to stay with the mountain metaphor, I would say that for most of my later 30’s I was already beginning to descend from the first mountain life stage--sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously—in order to detach from, or in some cases dismantle, my concretized False Self.
So the moment with the echocardiogram was merely the punctuation on an chapter in my life that was already winding down.
Though I should say, for me, the False Self was not completely false because I did not feel I was ever doing something that was outside of my value system.
Instead, the False Self for me just felt very limiting, constricting even, because it was only a very partial version or partial truth of my Whole Self that could be summed up as the "Good Girl" archetype, and unfortunatey meant that the much larger, richer whole of me was either being unconsciously suppressed or consciously omitted.
And of course my reasons for living small from the False Self were just like everyone else's (e.g. self-protection, fear of rejection, difficulty with conflict, etc.) because I still did not have the skills or the confidence that I could tolerate and remain equanimous while enduring the negative reactions of the world. So I needed to spend my 30's building up those True Self / Whole Self muscles in order to increase my own resiliency- before it felt safe enough to live from a more expansive truth.
And now, five years later from when I first read Stephen Cope's book, and many significant life changes later, I find myself coming full circle again as I now embark on my ‘Second Mountain.’
It’s times like these that remind me of that most well-known quote by American-British poet T.S. Elliot (1888-1965) from his work Four Quartets (1943):
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Heard, half-heard, in the stillness between two waves of the sea...
May it be so.
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