I just finished Gift from the Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. It had been recommended to me so many times--every time I told someone I was reading everything I could find on balance in women's lives, someone would insist "You must read Gift from the Sea!" I am partial to Anne Lindbergh's writing anyway, so I was eager to try it.
My first reaction was disappointment. How am I supposed to gain insight from the life of a woman so very different than I--a woman who can fly off to a beach home (a beach home? I can barely afford the home I have!) and spend several weeks alone. Who took care of her kids? Who did the housework? Did she just put them in the freezer till she came back? I'm not really relating here, LOL. And shells. Lindbergh's thoughts were centered around shells. I know NOTHING of shells. I grew up in Kansas and live in Iowa. Not a lot of personal experience, to picture the shells she describes and think "Oh, I know just that shell, and I know what you mean!"
My second reaction was that I did like some of the thoughts that she expressed. A few quotes I liked:
"The solution for me, surely, is neither in total renunciation of the world, nor in total acceptance of it. I must find a balance somewhere, or an alternating rhythm between the two extremes: a swinging of the pendulum between solitude and communion, between retreat and return."
"The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask."
"This is an end toward which we could strive--to be the still axis within the revolving wheel of relationships, obligations, and activities."
"But neither is the answer in dissipating our time and energy in more purposeless occupations, more accumulations which supposedly simplify life but actually burden it, more possessions which we have not time to use or appreciate, more diversions to fill up the void."
"It is fear, I think, that makes one cling nostalgically to the last moment or clutch greedily toward the next . . . how to exorcise it? It can only be exorcised with its opposite, love."
"Too many worthy activities, valuable things, and interesting people. For it is not merely the trivial which clutters our lives but the important as well. We can have a surfeit of treasures--an excess of shells, where one or two would be significant."
So, nice quotables for my journal. I picked up some worthwhile small shells, perhaps. But the overall message of the book left me strangely cold--as if Lindbergh and I were really talking at times about different things. She seems to have a quite different view of relationships, of solitude, of religious purpose, than I do. She quotes a passage from Rilke that gives me, for some reason, that creepy chilly feeling up and down my spine: "Solitude is not something that one can take or leave. We are solitary. We may delude ourselves and act as though this were not so. That is all. But how much better it is to realize that we are so, yes, even to begin by assuming it. Naturally we will turn giddy."
Silly of me, I suppose, to expect that everyone will understand my religious perspective--but I find my heart disputing this. True, in this imperfect world, we must come to terms with solitude--we are separated from God, from one another, by barriers we rarely contemplate, and only effort and care and thought and prayer can form the connections we want. But we are born for the connections. We are incomplete as we are, and must find the path to constant communion with our Father and also with our eternal companions, even though it take longer than our span of days on earth.
My ideas of this relationship with our companions likewise differ sharply from Lindbergh's. She again quotes Rilke: "And this more human love . . . will resemble that which we are with struggle and endeavor preparing, the love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other." Lindbergh goes on to discuss married life as this--two solitudes that bump into one another at times, as in a dance (the old kind, the carefully choreographed dances of Austen's time, now curtsy to your partner, touch and circle him, and move on, out of contact . . . ) This conception of marriage leaves me deeply unsatisfied. Can this be all our Father meant when he commanded us to be "one"? Not that I have this down perfectly, myself, in my own relationships, but I'd be eternally depressed if this "separate solitudes" is all that there is.
Bottom line: I'm not sorry I read the book--at only 138 pages it did not require much from me, but did not provide much food to satisfy the hunger of understanding the concept of balance and how to apply it to my life.