Week 29 Day 5

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Remember Your Mortality

Take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness, and cares of this life, and so that day come upon you unawares.

Luke 21:34

The world employs its various snares,

Of hopes and pleasures, pains and cares,

And chain’d to earth I lie:

When shall my fetter’d powers be free,

And leave these seats of vanity,

And upward learn to fly?

Even at the height of his success as president and commander in chief, Lincoln never forgot his mortality. He wasn’t fooled, like some successful men and women, into thinking he was a god. “We all know that we have to die,” he once wrote. “We know it because we know, or at least we think we know, that of all the beings just like ourselves who have been coming into the world for six thousand years, not one is now living who was here two hundred years ago.” Lincoln was well aware of his humanity, which was one of the reasons he was able to stay level-headed and make sound decisions. He knew there would be an end for him, that his fate was sealed just like that of everyone else. It was what kept him humble. And his humility is what made him great. Remember your mortality.