Big Idea Daily | Stillness Is the Key

“Vicksburg is the key,’ he [Lincoln] told the crowd with the certainty of a man who had studied the matter so intensely that he could express it in the simplest of terms. ‘The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket.’

 

As it happened, Lincoln turned out to be exactly right. It would take years, it would take incredible equanimity and patience, as well as ferocious commitment to his cause, but the strategy laid out in that room was what won the war and ended slavery in America forever. … In his reflective, intuitive manner, without being rushed or distracted, Lincoln had seen (and held fast to) what his own advisors, and even his enemy, had missed. Because he possessed the key that unlocked victory from the rancor and folly of all those early competing plans.

 

In our own lives, we face a seemingly equal number of problems and are pulled in countless directions by competing priorities and beliefs. In the way of everything we hope to accomplish, personally and professionally, sit obstacles and enemies. Martin Luther King Jr. observed that there was a violent civil war raging within each and every person—between our good and bad impulses, between our ambitions and our principles, between what we can be and how hard it is to actually get there.

 

In those battles, in that war, stillness is the river and the railroad junction through which so much depends. It is the key...

 

Stillness is the key to, well, just about everything.

 

To being a better parent, a better artist, a better investor, a better athlete, a better scientist, a better human being. To unlocking all that we are capable of in this life.”