http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/what-careerist-americans-can-learn-from-ike-dorothy-day-and-jimmy-buffett/277268/
Sketching Dwight Eisenhower's upbringing in Abilene, Kansas, historian Stephen Ambrose related an anecdote about the future president's moral education. Though well-loved by everyone in town for his good-natured curiosity, "Little Ike had a terrible temper," Ambrose wrote. "Anger would possess him, take complete control, make him oblivious to anything else. The adrenalin rushed through his body, raising the hair on the back of his neck, turning his face a bright beet-red." One Halloween, kept in from trick-or-treating while his older siblings sought candy, "anger overwhelmed him. He rushed outside and began pounding the trunk of an apple tree with his bare fists. He sobbed and pounded until his fists were a raw bleeding mass of torn flesh."
Up in his bedroom, Ike cried into his pillow for an hour. His mother entered the room. And then she paraphrased a Bible verse that he'd forever look back on as his most valuable childhood lesson:
He who conquereth his own soul is greater than he who taketh a city.
The paraphrased quote, repeated during a meandering Wednesday conversation between David Brooks and Arianna Huffington, comes as close as any one statement can to distilling what the ideologically not-quite-opposites both regard as a flaw in the American psyche: we overvalue professional success, measured in money and power, and undervalue introspection and the life well-lived*. "There's a moment for striving and achieving," Huffington said, but also a time for serving others, or for simply being -- cognizant that most earthly problems are revealed as inconsequential when we step back and ponder them in the grand scheme of the universe.
Brooks cited Dorothy Day as a role model in that respect. "She had this incredible career creating the Catholic Social Worker, then a bunch of soup kitchens for homeless people, a bunch of hospitals. She'd built this tremendous empire doing good," he said. "But one of the precious moments comes at the end of her life. She's a brilliant writer. She's been writing her whole life. She's giving an interview. And she says, 'I thought at the end of my life that I would write a memoir. So I sat down and I wrote at the top of the page, A Memoir. But I didn't feel like writing much. I'd sit down and start thinking about God, and how glad I was that he'd been on my mind. And I decided not to do it.' For such a great writer and an ambitious person, it was a moment when she decided not to write, not to create. Just to enjoy what she had. And it's a nice moment of surrender at the end of a life, when the ambitious side of her kneels down to the spiritual side, and she has that moment of tranquility. It's a beautiful end to a tremendous life."
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