A thoughtful farewell to summer
The change of season, especially to autumn, is always a welcome and refreshing time for me. Traveling diminishes, darkness encroaches sunlight and you hunker down into the coziness of cool mornings and hot drinks.
The prepping of hibernation drives me inside my home physically, but also mentally as fall always causes me to reflect. The beautiful cycle of life and death is brought to its last stages as the leaves change colors and the final harvest of pumpkins and chestnuts drop from vine and tree. So, too, our lives move and change despite our reluctancy or willingness to embrace it. Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s “Gift from the Sea” (Pantheon, 1991, 144 pages), although beachy and summery in its themes, is a short, lovely book of reflections that should be taken to heart all year round.
Lindbergh, a wife and mother, takes a solo trip to the beach where she contemplates the busyness of her life and the sudden stop an ocean vacation prompts. Her collection of seashells provides the inspiration to various meditations, rich in wisdom and simplicity, on the ways of life and relationships. While her thoughts often return to her state as a woman, wife and mother, they are by no means limited to just that audience. Instead, this book provides a beautifully and creatively written work that encourages all readers to find tranquility and contentment in their lives: not by changing their lives, but their perspectives.
Originally published in 1955, Lindbergh reflects often on the effect technological innovations have had on the home and the individual. While grateful for time-saving devices and gadgets, their accessibility is a double-edged sword. As she heads to the shore of the beach with nothing but the bare necessities, she begins to notice how distracting all those things and activities back home can be. This message of simplicity and warning against the unnecessary over-complication of our lives is even further expounded upon as she reflects on a channeled whelk.
However, simplicity is not only a matter of our surroundings. Striving for a simple life is not just decluttering homes and downsizing closets. Lindbergh points out that simplicity is inside as well as outside and that in order to simplify our interior lives, we must strive for opportunities of solitude. Just as a snail leaves its moon shell behind, so must we leave the shell of our lives, briefly but regularly, into a space of solitude. If a writer in the 1950s was urging for quiet contemplation and solitude, I can’t imagine how passionate she would be now in the 2020s when it seems that peace and silence is not only a rarity, but one that must be fought for if found.
While these two were my personal favorites of her meditations, the subsequent lessons are just as enjoyable and insightful. Her musings on love, relationships and marriage take a chronological journey as she ponders a rare double-sunrise, an oyster bed and the collector’s argonauta. I appreciate her honest assessment of the balancing act every human must make in relationships, trying to walk the line between personal needs and obligations to the people in our lives. She manages to acknowledge the needs each individual has, especially for solitude, without endorsing a selfish lifestyle where the ego always comes first. Family, friends, lovers, work: each of these come with responsibility but not one that monopolizes everything.
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When packing up to leave the beach, she points out the significance of selectivity. It is the singularity of each shell that makes them stand out and so with the ideas they each represent. There are many good ideas and valuable lessons in the world, but we can’t do it all and we can’t make each noble aim our own. If we take all of the shells, they lose their shine; all the admirable pursuits will lead us to none. Just as Lindbergh takes her small seashell collection home, let us take our small introspections home. They will grow in their beauty and uniqueness if we keep just a few in our lives rather than overloading it with quantity.
As eager as everyone can be to embrace their sweaters, boots and chai tea lattes, I highly recommend taking one last dip into Lindbergh’s book. Her reflections on the beauty of nature’s seashells can be for us this fall, a reminder to pause and consider the autumnal simplicity around us, and to allow the wonder it inspires to take root in our heart this winter and hopefully, blossom into little buds of new growth in our lives.
(Anna Barren teaches fifth grade and is a lifelong lover of books. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
