Maintaining Hope Amidst Turmoil
(Read this on the Growth EQ website here.)
“I am now the most miserable man living,” remarked the thirty-something-year-old man who had suffered two mental breakdowns and was frequented by thoughts of suicide.
His friends described him as a “sad, gloomy man, a man of sorrow.” And it wasn’t a surprise as to why.
He’d suffered his entire life — losing his brother, mom, and sister at a relatively young age. For much of his early adult life, he was “friendless, uneducated, and penniless.” His cousin once once described him as “a very lazy man.” And the former Secretary of State once remarked, “He is evidently a person of very inferior cast of character, wholly unequal to the crisis.”
Yet, people from far and wide now sing his praise. As one of the world’s greatest writer’s, Leo Tolstoy, once documented, “He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder, he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were as strong as the rock and as sweet as the fragrance of roses…He was so great that he even forgave the crimes of his greatest enemies and shook brotherly hands with those who had plotted against his life. His name was Lincoln.”
Abraham Lincoln displayed the kind of internal strength that we now thoroughly admire. He combined his steadiness with a willingness to adjust and change as he searched for the right general who could lead his country to victory before finally finding his man, Ulysses S. Grant. He had a level of humility and realism that few possess when obtaining the highest office in the land, referring to himself as “a man without a name.” He struggled immensely with the unprecedented casualties of the war, often breaking down into tears in the White House, but he showed a level of emotional control and awareness with how he presented himself to the public. He was able to pause and step back, even in even the grimmest of circumstances.
In 1863, after suffering heavy defeat after defeat, the Union finally secured a victory. General George Meade had pushed back General Robert E. Lee and the Confederate Army at Gettysburg. It would come to be known as the turning point of the war. Yet, in the days that followed, Lincoln was not overjoyed; he was furious by all accounts. Lincoln was upset at the missed opportunity. Robert E. Lee had gotten away. Out of anger, he penned a letter to General Meade, writing, “my dear general, I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely. Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it.”
The letter didn’t make it to General Meade. Lincoln never sent it. It was found in his desk after his assassination. This wasn’t a mistake. Lincoln often wrote letters that he did not send. He’d pour his thoughts and feelings into the note he called a “hot letter,” then set it aside. It was his way of coping, of managing the anger or emotions he might have felt. It ensured that he didn’t send a brash message that might have made him feel better in that moment but backfired on his ultimate goal. He was creating space so he could find the best decision.
Lincoln didn’t emerge from the womb prepared to take on his nation’s most difficult challenge. The “melancholy” or what we’d now call clinical depression, that Lincoln faced was so intense that friends and colleagues worried he was “on the brink of insanity.” After one particularly rough patch, a friend reported, “The Doctors say he came within an inch of being a perfect lunatic for life.” Throughout his life, discomfort was seldom far behind. He experienced one tragedy and setback after the next. Yet, he came to see such misery and suffering not as something to be avoided or shunned away, but as something to endure, understand, and eventually grow from. Lincoln developed his inner strength. It wasn’t handed to him.
During the crucial period before he ascended to the presidency, his letters to friends are filled with advice on handling the struggles of life. To a close friend with cold feet on his wedding day, he recommended a mixture of equanimity and realism: “Get through the ceremony calmly, or even with sufficient composure not to excite alarm in any present, you are safe, beyond question, and in two or three months, to say the most, will be the happiest of men.” To a friend of his son, who had just been rejected by Harvard, he wrote, “If you will allow no feeling of discouragement to seize, and prey upon you. It is a certain truth, that you can enter, and graduate in, Harvard University; and having made the attempt, you must succeed in it. Must is the word.”
For his own struggles, Lincoln had several coping strategies. He relied on jokes as a means of distraction, storytelling as a way to connect with others, and poetry to investigate and understand the depths of his feelings and emotions. Lincoln didn’t shy away from the difficult. He sought to see it clearly. As his law partner, William Hendon, once observed, “Mr. Lincoln’s perceptions were slow, cold, clear, and exact…He saw all things through a perfect mental lens. There was no diffraction or refraction there… He crushed the unreal, the inexact, the hollow, and the sham.”
In 1854, Lincoln sought to move from a political career that had included a single term in the House of Representatives six years earlier to his ultimate goal, United States Senator. During that time, senators were not elected by the public but by state senators, with rounds of voting occurring until a candidate received a majority. In the 1854 election, Lincoln led the first couple rounds, getting as close to six votes from the win. Yet, he knew that with each passing vote, his support would wane, as he could not convince six more legislators to come to his side. That opened the door for opponents who he thought would do damage to the causes he cared about. So Lincoln dropped out, throwing his support to a member of the opposing party, Lyman Trumball. Although Lincoln was disappointed, he would later write, “I could not . . . let the whole political result go to ruin on a point merely personal to myself.” Lincoln put his ego aside for a cause. A decade later, Trumball would co-author the 13th amendment.
In his mid-forties, a floundering Lincoln found the item that would drive him to put others before his own ambitions, to persevere through not only an 1854 senate loss but also a failed vice-presidential nomination two years later and another senate bid four years later. That purpose was addressing the scorn of slavery. A practice that, in the 1850s, he had grown to oppose in public and private. In an 1855 letter to his closest friend, Lincoln excoriated the hypocrisy of slavery. Ending with, “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.”
Lincoln had found his purpose.
In 1858, Lincoln tried again, running for Senator against Stephen Douglas, a man who Lincoln held little sympathy for. In accepting his party’s nomination for Senate candidate, Lincoln prepared a speech. One that his friends and colleagues warned “will defeat your election. It will ruin the Republican Party.” To which, Lincoln replied, “if it is decreed that I should go down because of this speech, then let me go down linked to the truth. Let me die in advocacy of what is just and right.” What followed was Lincoln’s famous House Divided speech.
Lincoln was after change. And he felt the ultimate goal might only occur long after he perished. He once asked, “Whoever heard of a reformer reaping the reward of his labors in his lifetime?” And of that 1858 speech, Lincoln astutely prophesized, “I am after larger game. The battle of 1860 is worth a hundred of this.” He put principles ahead of favor and dropped his ego so that he could do what was right, even if those benefits were not seen until long after he was gone.
Equanimity, flexibility, seeing reality, humility, emotional awareness, and control, putting your ego aside. And a driving purpose to fuel the journey. Honest Abe was, of course, human, with foibles and flaws like the rest of us. He was a man of contrasts, weeping freely, yet known for his stoicism. He was known for seeing the world as it was, through a lens of depressive realism, while at the same time engendering an endless hope that progress was near and possible. That even in the throes of the nation’s bitter conflict, that we could all come together and strive for a “more perfect union.” Optimism, pessimism, and realism all rolled into one.
How did Lincoln lead America through its most bitter divide? Not through bluster or bravado. But via tragic optimism. He needed to see things clearly. As Joshua Wolf Shrink, author of Lincoln’s Melancholy, wrote, “He was always inclined to look at the full truth of a situation, assessing both what could be known and what remained in doubt.” But at the same time, he held on to hope for the future. That over time, a path toward a better, fairer, more united America would emerge. When he kept suffering defeat after defeat, he remained hopeful for the future. As Shrink wrote, “When faced with uncertainty, he had the patience, endurance, and vigor to stay in that place of tension, and the courage to be alone.” The unlikeliest of heroes emerged when the nation needed him most. And he did so with a unique mixture of bitter realism and hope.
And that’s the message we want to leave you with. Hope is the most powerful of substances. Lincoln was a bitter realist in the day-to-day tasks that lay before him, but he retained hope for the future. The same can be said about holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, who coined the phrase tragic optimism. He often spoke and wrote about the power of hope, “Those who know how close the connection is between the state of mind of a man, his courage and hope, or lack of them and the state of immunity of his body will understand that sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect.”
So wherever you fall on the spectrum, we hope that you take a page out of these pillars of resilience and courage, maintaining a clear eye on what you can do in the here and now, but also don’t lose hope of a better future. That’s what the American experiment is about. It’s not a straightforward rise towards life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is a meandering one. But the key is that we don’t lose sight of our core values and that pursuit, no matter how dark it may seem in the moment.
— Steve
