November 19: A Link with Lincoln

On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln commenced a terse speech. As he examined the solemn crowd gathered around the soldiers' cemetery, Lincoln probably saw many icy expressions glaring back at him. His audience, composed mostly of inhabitants of Gettysburg, still bitterly remembered the smell of 7,500 rotting corpses that had covered their town four months ago. And they knew that those fallen men composed a mere fraction of the quarter-million soldiers who had died for this war. The moment Lincoln started his speech, he knew many people in the town and the nation hated him.

Four score and seven (plus 49) years later, a squealing baby girl unwillingly emerged from her mother's aching body. I was immediately off to a nasty start in the world. For one thing, I was nine days late. Apparently, I didn't want to leave my warm, well-padded personal universe. I was also troublesome. The 43 hour birth caused my mother the most excruciating pain of her life. Plus, she had an allergic reaction to the pain medication, causing her to hallucinate about snakes slithering around the hospital table and spiders creeping down the doctor's arms. After I begrudgingly exited her body, my mother swore never to have any more children. And she kept her word. I wonder how many lives I prevented with my violent clinging to her womb

Lincoln spoke in his high-pitched Kentucky accent for three minutes, redefining the Civil War as not merely a fight for the Union, but a struggle for freedom and equality. He concluded his speech with a fervent oath that the "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." When he finished, no one applauded him. Silence hovered above the graves. The listeners had passionately clapped for the three hour speech that had preceded Lincoln's, given by Harvard president Edward Everett. When Everett complimented Lincoln on the brief address, Lincoln replied that he was glad it wasn't a "total failure."

After such a melodramatic birth, you would think the rest of my life would be similarly epic. And in some ways, I suppose it has been. Nasty tears, fierce thoughts, soothing laughs, deep breaths, and taunting dreams are all epic in their own ordinary ways. Even a raindrop sliding down your neck is epic if you think about it. Nevertheless, I'm cursed with that common, obnoxious desire to dazzle. To be seen. To be remembered. To be important. To burn the world with my thoughts and singe time with my actions. Yet, I am one in six billion. One who will die in a galaxy's wink of time. Why should I see myself as anything but a twig in time's fire?

Lincoln never knew that his carefully crafted speech would endure long after his tall body decayed. He never heard Carl Sandburg or Martin Luther King quote the iconic phrases. He never witnessed historians proclaim it "the turning point of the civil war." A bullet extinguished him, and he died in a finger's twitch of time.

I know death is inevitable, but the idea still viciously claws at my mind. What if I die ordinary? What if my rage against the dying of the light never sparks massive change or personal fulfillment? Yet perhaps my life's actions, just as the speech uttered on my birthday, will ripple through time in some unforeseeable way. Perhaps all people serve the future just as vitally and intensely as we serve the present, though not as clearly. Lincoln did not give the Gettysburg Address so his face could be stamped on bronze and paper currency. Desire for epic fame did not fuel his words. Rather, desire for present benevolence lit a brilliant trail of future good.

Who knows what sparks we ignite unknowingly?