The source of our agitation is rarely external. We want badly to believe that someone else bears the blame for our sour attitude and snippy remarks. Yet, if we consider the world, we will find self-possessed, dignified people in difficult circumstances and petulant, irritated people in the lap of luxury. What is the secret of tranquil people?
Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote on the subject with especial attention to wives and mothers. In her meditative essays found in “Gift from the Sea,” she expresses her desire “to be at peace with myself.” Her pensive reflections on life by way of analogy with different types of shells are the type of writing that seems either to resonate deeply or to irritate.
Upon meeting a woman who tells you with frank candor how much she struggles to get along with her mother and then later tells you her mother rereads religiously “Gift from the Sea” every summer, you can guess rightly that this is not a woman who enjoys Morrow Lindbergh’s writing. It’s hard to pin down why some people find the little essays with charming little illustrations of each shell at the beginning of each chapter so enlightening and some people merely grumble that it must be nice to have so much household help and the ability to take a week-long personal retreat to an isolated beach in Florida.
If gazing at a shell and finding deep insight into the experience of married love and the strain of life and growth that comes with having children appeals, “Gift from the Sea” is a perfect summer beach read, beach and shells not strictly necessary.
Morrow Lindbergh is particularly poignant in her reflections on being “in grace” and “out of grace.” She does not refer here to a moral state but to the existential feeling we all know even if we have not reached for words to describe it. She writes, “In the first happy condition, one seems to carry all one’s tasks before one lightly, as if borne along on a great tide; and in the opposite state one can hardly tie a shoe-string. It is true that a large part of life consists in learning a technique of tying the shoe-string, whether one is in grace or not. But there are techniques of living, too; there are even techniques in the search of grace. And techniques can be cultivated.”
A widow with a wry sense of humor I met years ago often quoted her beloved husband who used to say, “It takes guts to get out of rut.” Indeed, there’s much to be said for soldiering on when there is no vivifying sense of purpose and beauty, fulfilling duty no matter how much it weighs us down. But there is a type of courage in being willing to find a reason to hope again, to seek earnestly for that fire of passion that comes with curiosity and delight. Merely fulfilling duty, completing the next task on the list, is the bare minimum. While it is the most we will be able to muster on many occasions, it cannot be called living in full.
As Morrow Lindbergh suggests, there are strategies that can enhance our movement toward grace, our experience of seeing the world in color, being able to rest in the beauty that is inevitable even amid the hurt and pain we so often witness and experience. For the mother disturbed by incessant noise, the apparent chaos of entropy, the discord of many personalities pushed together in a family, such strategies can be elusive. Add to that the nights of little sleep when children are awake with fever, the hours of unhappy boredom, days of bland meals lacking nutrients when cooking feels so burdensome, and months of recovering from injuries and most mothers are unlikely to employ successfully many of the strategies that lead to tranquility, that state of grace. Granted, that’s all a bit overdramatized but if you observe many a mother (“screaming on the inside,” as so many mothers like to describe themselves now) she displays this state of chronic fatigue and is ill at ease.
Reflecting on her life as a wife and mother of five, Morrow Lindbergh writes, “With new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions. The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls—woman’s normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life.”
I’ve written elsewhere about the imagined limitations of motherhood and womanhood that Morrow Lindbergh thought she saw, even while disproving them with her actions. She goes so far as to recognize that the soul of her writing are her experiences as a mother, yet she continually flagellates herself for inadequate writing output (in the written word, which is why we know about) and blames the inadequate volume on her state in life.
No matter. The good woman has a worthwhile reflection written on a remote beach island off the coast of Florida. In an amusing addendum to the original publication, Morrow Lindbergh notes that she was stunned by the stage of life when her children were grown and the house was quiet. How did she not anticipate? In some ways, the crushing demands of motherhood, the physical realities of food and sleep required daily, impose a myopia that makes looking ahead to next week, let alone ten years from now very difficult.
In order to see anything other than bare necessity, taking time to find calm moments set apart from the ordinary, whether a week-long jaunt to the beach or a simple, quiet cup of tea, are the source of perspective and purpose. It’s not enough to shrug and sigh that we live in chaos and inner turmoil. Our calling demands more than mere survival. We strive for living in full.
