Gift from the Sea

Recharging

WHEN I STARTED in book publishing, in 1987, after I returned from my three postcollege years working as a journalist and magazine editor in Hong Kong, I spent long hours at the office. I was never prompt in the morning, but I stayed late just about every night and worked just about every weekend. I didn’t always work very efficiently. But I worked. It was a different time; we still used carbon paper to make copies of the letters we wrote, and only the executive secretaries were lucky enough to have IBM Selectric typewriters, with their magical rolling balls. The rest of us (from assistants like me all the way up to senior editors) made do with balky Smith Coronas, which had cartridges you would snap in and snap out when you needed to make corrections.

I was proud of how hard I worked. I was in my mid-twenties and was confident that no one logged more hours than I did.

One spring day, however, I had a conversation that greatly changed my thoughts on work. It was with a formidable editor, one of the stars of the company. She was then in her fifties and was known for her editorial acumen and occasionally sharp tongue. But she seemed to like me, and we spoke often. In fact, I’d never seen evidence of the sharp tongue. I thought we were just chatting when she asked me how much time I was taking off that summer and if I was going to be able to afford to leave town for my holiday.

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to take a holiday this year,” I told her. “I’m way too busy.”

Suddenly, she became very severe. She fixed me with an icy glare and then said, “I thought better of you. But you’re clearly either a megalomaniac or a fool.” She paused. “You’re a megalomaniac if you think we all can’t survive for a few weeks without your contributions. And you’re a fool if you think we can, but still insist on working through your vacation.”

It was several days before she spoke warmly to me again. And when she did, I told her of my plan to visit a friend on the nearby Jersey Shore.

I thought of this conversation when I read Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s classic book, Gift from the Sea.

This is one of those books I’d heard about and seen on countless shelves, especially in, predictably enough, beach cottages. The author was the widow of aviator Charles Lindbergh and the mother of the baby who had been so notoriously kidnapped and murdered in 1932.

In an introduction to the fiftieth-anniversary edition, Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s daughter Reeve writes of her mother:

I remember how small and delicate she always seemed. I remember her intelligence and her sensitivity. But when I reread Gift from the Sea, the illusion of fragility falls away, leaving the truth. How could I forget? She was, after all, a woman who raised five children after tragically losing her first son in 1932. She was the first woman in America to earn a first-class glider pilot’s license, in 1930, and the first woman ever to win the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal, in 1934, for her aviation and exploration adventures. She also received the National Book Award, in 1938, for Listen! The Wind, her novel based on those adventures, and she remained a best-selling author all her life.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, even with all her published works, remains something of an enigma. This is especially true with regard to her noninterventionist stance in the early years of World War II. Her antiwar writings prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor may have been fueled by naive pacifism and the desire to support her husband. She would later express regret about what she called her ignorance and blindness with regard to Hitler and Nazi Germany.

Twenty-three years after the murder of her son and ten years after the end of World War II, Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote Gift from the Sea. It became an immediate sensation, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in its first year and millions since. It has never been out of print.

Gift from the Sea is a quiet book of reflections and meditations written during and after a period of time spent at the Florida seashore. Each chapter takes its inspiration from a different shell the author finds along the beach. The book contains Lindbergh’s thoughts on feminism, the environment, motherhood, marriage, work, love, independence, and, more broadly, how we manage our time and our lives.

Some of Lindbergh’s advice comes across as dated. But most of it doesn’t. Her words are directed toward other women, but most of her advice is for anyone who seeks to find balance in life.

The first gift from the sea is a channeled whelk shell. She is struck by the simplicity, bareness, and beauty of that shell. Her “shell” is not at all like that. She writes of the life in her house in the suburbs:

It involves food and shelter; meals, planning, marketing, bills and making the ends meet in a thousand ways. It involves not only the butcher, the baker, the candlestickmaker but countless other experts to keep my modern house with its modern “simplifications” (electricity, plumbing, refrigerator, gas-stove, oil-burner, dish-washer, radios, car and numerous other labor-saving devices) functioning properly. It involves health; doctors, dentists, appointments, medicine, cod-liver oil, vitamins, trips to the drugstore. It involves education, spiritual, intellectual, physical; schools, school conferences, car-pools, extra trips for basket-ball or orchestra practice; tutoring; camps, camp equipment and transportation. It involves clothes, shopping, laundry, cleaning, mending, letting skirts down and sewing buttons on, or finding someone else to do it. It involves friends, my husband’s, my children’s, my own, and endless arrangements to get together; letters, invitations, telephone calls and transportation hither and yon.

My husband and I have no children. We’ve never wanted children of our own, which is good because we can barely keep our one houseplant alive. But our friends who are parents tell me that this description of life fifty years ago almost exactly describes their lives today.

Lindbergh also writes about the challenges of “ever widening circles of contact and communication.” She’s referring to print media and radio—but she could easily be talking about Facebook and Twitter and Instagram as well: “What a circus act we women perform every day.”

The problem as she sees it is “how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life.”

The solution? Neither easy nor complete. She notes that it isn’t possible to renounce life, to become a hermit, a nun. What she can do, she decides, is to establish an alternating rhythm between the clutter of her daily life and the simplicity she experiences at the beach and the beach house. She notes that, “for the most part, we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication.” The gift of the whelk shell is the reminder to choose, whenever possible, simplicity.

The moon shell is another gift from the sea: this shell reminds her of the importance of relearning to be alone and scheduling time alone. “The world today does not understand, in either man or woman, the need to be alone.” She writes that if you say you have a business appointment scheduled, no one will try to convince you to break it to schedule something routine. “But if one says: I cannot come because that is my hour to be alone, one is considered rude, egotistical or strange.” She is particularly adamant that women need solitude—and must find a way to get it, however they can.

Other shells bring her thoughts on love, relationships, and acceptance, silence, selectivity, significance, and beauty. The shell that brings her the gift of beauty is especially important to her.

She writes, “My life in Connecticut, I begin to realize, lacks this quality of significance and therefore of beauty, because there is so little empty space…Too many activities, and people, and things. 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.”

An excess of shells is certainly a happy problem. But it is a problem nonetheless.

Her solution is surprising: to choose whenever possible the unknown over the familiar, for “it is the unknown with all its disappointments and surprises that is the most enriching.”

As I am writing this, the world (including myself) is caught up in a love affair with a book called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Japanese home-organization guru Marie Kondo. The book instructs you to go through your home, category by category, not room by room or closet by closet. You lay out all your clothes on the floor; or all your books; or all your knickknacks. And then you hold up each item and ask yourself if it gives you joy. If it doesn’t, out it goes. It’s a technique that works, but works best for those who live alone. Several couples I know have been embroiled in ferocious arguments when one person decided that every single item laid out on the floor still gave joy and the other felt quite the opposite.

I’ve attempted to apply Kondo’s advice. I’ve been very successful with my clothes, which is probably because I don’t care very much about clothes. I’ve not been very successful with ridding myself of books. Most of my books give me joy. Even Bruce Lee’s Tao of Jeet Kune Do, the manual for a martial art I will never practice. Even each one of my several coffee table books devoted to portraits of ornamental chickens. (Actually, those give joy to everyone who sees them.) And once a cookbook enters my home, it’s never leaving.

Nor am I parting with Kondo’s book. It gives me joy, too. Reading it allows me a vision of my life where we can set our mugs of tea on a table without having to clear a space for them; where our chest of drawers isn’t crammed full of odds and ends; where we have eight plates that all match and not eleven sole survivors from previous sets and rummage sales.

I enjoy the Kondo fantasy. And it is indeed a pleasure to be able to find things easily in my now-somewhat-cleaner closet. And yet I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be any happier in the completely pristine version of my life than I am in its semi-messy present.

While Kondo gives techniques for ridding ourselves of physical clutter, Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s book reminds us of all the other kinds of clutter that burden us. It also helps us forgive ourselves when we realize that jettisoning our emotional and spiritual clutter is more difficult than the very difficult task of throwing away all that stuff that no longer gives us joy.