Historians analyzing the greatness of Abraham Lincoln are frequently perplexed as to how one who started so far back in the pack with few natural talents and attributes managed to win the race, securing his place in history as the greatest of all our presidents. What was there about him?
I’d like to suggest that one key factor, particularly in the younger Lincoln, was the quietness of the world in which he lived and what he did with it: he thought. He read a lesson, then mulled it over as he walked from one village to another or as he did his chores. He did not do what the average person would do, read something and check it off the list and go on to the next lesson. What he read lingered with him because he focused on it and thought about it. Some say Lincoln never went on to new book until he had mastered the content of the one he was studying.
Imagine jerking up someone from the 21st century and plopping them down in the middle of, say, 1825, when Mr. Lincoln was 16 years old. His first sensation would surely be of the overwhelming silence. No freeways with heavy traffic 24 hours a day, no planes filling the skies, no radio, no television, no phone, no trains, and very few factory whistles if any. To be sure, everyone else had the same amount of silence and the same absence of distractions from pure, deep thought as did Lincoln.
The difference is that Lincoln used the quietness wisely; he thought about things.
Blaise Pascal observed, “All the evils of life have fallen upon us because men will not sit alone quietly in a room.”