Posted on by Asia Lenae

Anne Morrow Lindbergh on How All Phases of Love Are Equally Valid

All life is motion: electrons circle an atom’s nucleus, planets hurl through space.  Earth turns on its axis at a speed of roughly 1,000 miles per hour: day dissipates into night, night disappears into day.  Life hibernates in winter only to be reawakened in spring.  Nothing is stable— not even the ground beneath our feet.  Seas crash into shorelines, transforming mighty mountains into minuscule grains.  The land we stand on isn’t steady and unchanging— it’s composed of constantly shifting Tectonic plates.  We imagine life is static but if we observed a map of our Earth 250 million years ago, it would look entirely different from what it does today.

The only constant in life is change yet nothing terrifies us more than the idea that things never remain the same.  In love, we’re especially resistant to change.  The moment we sense a shift in our relationship, we become overcome by a paralyzing sense of dread.  Maybe after a few years together, our sex has become less imaginative and less frequent.  Maybe our calendars are no longer bursting with social activities and soirées and concerts and comedy shows and parties.  Maybe our love life seems like a pathetic exercise in monotony.

In the stable security of a long-term relationship, we yearn for the rapturous intoxication of young romance.  What happened to the all-night conversations, the giddy school girl excitement of getting a text message from our beloved?  What happened to the intense, impassioned, “I need to have you” sex? 

In her immeasurably insightful book Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh suggests it is natural for some of the fervor in a relationship to fade.  In much the same way that a flower wilts in winter, our romance will occasionally decay.  Nothing lasts, all is flux, all is change.  But there’s no need to worry.  Our love will be reborn in another form in the spring.  

Lindbergh spent nearly half a century married to aviator and American hero Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly across the Atlantic alone.  In their 45 years together, Anne learned firsthand the trials and tribulations of being one half of a couple.  In a lyrical passage of uncommon insight and uncommon beauty, Morrow concedes that nothing— not even love— is everlasting:

“The ‘veritable life’ of our emotions and our relationships…is intermittent.  When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment.  It is an impossibility.  It is even a lie to pretend to.  And yet this is exactly what most of us demand.  We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships.  We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb.  We are afraid it will never return.  We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity— in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern. The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even.  Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what is was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now.  For relationships, too, must be like islands.  One must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits— islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, continually visited and abandoned by the tides.  One must accept the security of the winged life, of ebb and flow, of intermittency.”

Ultimately, life is a pendulum that swings between opposite poles: hope and despair, joy and sorrow.  The Lindberghs understood this fact perhaps more than any other couple.  In their 45 years together, they experienced agony and ecstasy, storms of adversity and moments of calm.  Called the “First Couple of the Skies,” Charles and Anne seemed to live a charmed life: over the course of their career, they flew tens of thousands of miles across four continents to explore transatlantic air routes.  Their work took them everywhere from the Orient to the Amazon jungle.  Both Charles and Anne were celebrated as heroes.

Despite their many triumphs, tragedy struck when their 20 month year old son, Charles, was kidnapped from his nursery and killed in the spring of 1932.  Besides having to cope with the unimaginable loss of their son, Charles and Anne had to endure the ensuing media frenzy and the paparazzi’s unremitting flashbulbs.

Much like life, our relationships pass through cycles.  The obsessive infatuation of a crush will eventually give way to steady companionship after a few years.  At times, the flames of passion will burn ferociously; at others, our desire will only be a few smoldering embers.  Over the course of a relationship, there will be affectionate nicknames and four-letter words, amorous whispers and  enraged screams, moments of domestic bliss and nights soaked in tears.  We must not glorify the honeymoon phase or fear our relationship changing as we get older.  Each phase of life, each phase of love has its own lessons to teach us.  As Morrow writes,

“Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid.”

Want more wisdom from the lovely Lindbergh?  Read the pioneering aviator on love’s many phases,  why we should seek solitude and why we should shed the shell of our ordinary lives and go to the beach.  

Posted on by Asia Lenae

Anne Morrow Lindbergh on Love’s Many Phases & How to Save a Relationship in Crisis

Human beings crave consistency.  We want our relationships, especially our romantic ones, to remain the same.  However, all things change.  Love goes through phases.  At different times, love waxes and wanes.

When we first fall in love, things are novel, exciting.  With the mere mention of our beloved’s name, our heart dashes, our stomach fills with butterflies.  In the beginning, the object of our adoration can do no wrong in our eyes.  Everything he says is endlessly captivating; we find his jokes hilarious, though they meander and he often doesn’t land the punchline.  We’re so in love that we can spend hours just staring into each other’s eyes.

But as days elapse into months and months elapse into years, our relationship inevitably becomes burdened by work and other responsibilities.  No longer are we two carefree, giddily-in-love twenty-somethings— we now have marriage, a mortgage, a baby.  We’re more likely to snap at our husband for forgetting to buy milk at the grocery store than stare at each other longingly.  Our conversations no longer contain hints of light-hearted flirtation and sexy bantering— they’re defined by practical, distinctly uninteresting topics like what to buy our nephew for his birthday and whose turn it is to fold the laundry.  Our relationship more closely resembles the relationship between business partners or roommates.

In her timeless treasure trove, Gift from the Sea, which also explained why we should seek out solitude and shed the shell of our ordinary lives and go to the beach, Anne Morrow Lindbergh reminds us all romantic relationships pass through such phases as certainly as night follows day.

The honeymoon phase— what Lindbergh calls the “double sunrise” phase— is pure bliss.  Because we’re not yet deadened and desensitized by habit, there’s still carnal connection, there’s still mystery, there’s still romance.

But when the flames of first love inevitably cool, we panic.  What— we wonder— happened to passion’s fiery flames?  What happened to the “spark” we had in the beginning of the relationship?  

But the fact is nothing is wrong with us if our relationship changes.  All things change: waves crash and recede, plants grow.  In much the same way that we only want to experience the flower-filled rapture of spring and avoid bleak, biting winters of the soul, we idealize the honeymoon and dread the moment we have to pack up our bags and come home.  But love is not the giddiness of a summer fling— it’s building a life with someone in the real world.  As Lindbergh writes, 

“It is true, of course, the original relationship is very beautiful.  Its self-enclosed perfection wears the freshness of a spring morning.  Forgetting about the summer to come, one often feels one would like to prolong the spring of early love, when two people stand as individuals, without past or future, facing each other.  One resents any change, even though one knows that transformation is natural and part of the process of life and its evolution.  Like its parallel, physical passion, the early ecstatic stage of a relationship cannot continue always at the same pitch of intensity.  It moves to another phase of growth one should not dread, but welcome as one welcomes summer after spring.”

Sometimes, however, there really is a problem.  Perhaps after decades together, we no longer make an effort to express our affection or spend quality time together.  Instead of visit the Van Gogh exhibit or make reservations at the French bistro, we spend our Saturday nights sitting next to each other on the coach, together but not truly together, as we mindlessly scroll through our phones.  In the rose-colored haze of nostalgia, we reminisce about the good old days when our lover surprised us with bouquets of tulips and couldn’t wait to chat over red wine and spaghetti bolognese when he came home.  

Bored of our passionless union, lonely and longing for connection, we might be tempted to seek excitement in an affair outside of our marriage.  After all, if the problem is our partner, the solution must be someone else.  Someone else will bother to plan a date every once in awhile.  Someone else will pamper us with flowers and thoughtful handwritten notes.  Someone else will occasionally listen instead of be endlessly engrossed by his phone.  

However, “someone else” is almost never the answer to our martial woes.  It’s futile to try to recapture the ecstasy of early love.  Even if we do find someone else who’s intelligent and interesting, our infatuation will eventually wear off.  At first, an affair can be sexy, stimulating: sneaking around to see each other, stealing clandestine kisses on our lunch break.  But after a few weeks or months, our furtive fling will be just as predictable as the marriage we so unsuccessfully tried to escape.

So what’s the solution?

Rather than have an affair, we should commit to rediscovering our sense of self.  Most often, a dissatisfaction with our marriage is a dissatisfaction with ourselves.  Despite the romantic notion that finding our Platonic soul mate will finally complete our incomplete souls, another person cannot save us.  Before we can be content in matrimony, we must be content with ourselves.  According to Lindbergh, women can find contentment by committing to their creativity and carving out time of their own away from the pressures of motherhood and domesticity:

“But neither woman nor man are likely to be fed by another relationship which seems easier because it is in an earlier stage.  Such a love affair cannot really bring back a sense of identity.  Certainly, one has the illusion that one will find oneself in being loved for what one really is, not for a collection of functions.  But can one actually find oneself in someone else?  In someone else’s love?  Or even in the mirror someone else holds up for one?  I believe that true identity is found, as Eckhart once said, by ‘going into one’s own ground and knowing oneself.’  It is found in creative activity springing from within.  It is found, paradoxically, when one loses oneself.  One must lose one’s life to find it.  Woman can best refind herself by losing herself in some kind of creative activity of her own.  Here she will be able to refind her strength, the strength she needs to look and work at the second half of the problem— the neglected pure relationship.  Only a refound person can refind a personal relationship.”

Though we can’t entirely resurrect the fire of first love, we can rekindle some of the flames.  One easy way to restore some of the romance of the “double sunrise” stage is to go on vacation and step away from our ordinary lives and usual routines.  At home, there are a million and one distractions that interfere with intimacy: carpool, crying children, client calls, endless emails and meetings.  But in a cabin in the countryside or a cottage by the sea, we can finally focus on our partner.  Nothing revives love like a hotel room in a foreign city (As British philosopher Alain de Botton so insightfully observed, new settings can inspire us to see things in new ways).

However, a romantic getaway doesn’t always have to involve traveling thousands of miles away.  We can rescue our relationship in our own kitchens— not just in bungalows in Bora Bora or villas in Tuscany.  Sometimes a quiet breakfast over orange juice and banana bread muffins is all we need to feel reconnected.  As Lindbergh writes gracefully, 

“Husband and wife can and should go off on vacations alone and also on vacations alone together.  For if it is possible that woman can find herself by having a vacation alone, it is equally possible that the original relationship can sometimes be refound by having a vacation alone together.  Most married couples have felt the unexpected joy of one of these vacations.  How wonderful it was to leave the children, the house, the job, and all the obligations of daily life; to go out together, whether for a month or a weekend or even just a night in an inn by themselves.  How surprising it was to find the miracle of the sunrise repeated.  There was the sudden pleasure of having breakfast alone with the man one fell in love with.  Here at the small table, are only two people facing each other.  How the table at home has grown!  And how distracting it is, with four or five children, a telephone ringing in the hall, two or three school buses to catch, not to speak of the commuter’s train.  How all this separates one from one’s husband and clogs up the pure relationship.  But sitting at a table alone opposite each other, what is there to separate one?  Nothing but a coffee pot, corn muffins and marmalade.  A simple enough pleasure, surely, to have breakfast alone with one’s husband, but how seldom married people in the midst of life achieve it.”

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 2 Comments

Anne Morrow Lindbergh on Why We Should Seek Out Solitude

In our extroverted society, there’s no greater compliment than being called “sociable.”  We worship those who are gregarious and genial.  We aim to be the “life of the party” who charms with his clever jokes and interesting anecdotes— not the awkward loner shuffling his feet and staring at his phone.  Being popular and well-liked is a sign of good character; keeping to yourself is deemed pathological.

Though it is important to build relationships with others, it’s just as important— perhaps even more so— to build a relationship with ourselves.  In her classic guide to creative, contemplative living, Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh suggests solitude is an oasis amidst the hustle and bustle of the modern world.  In one of the most gracefully observed chapters “Moon Shell,” she argues we must wake up from the collective delusion that we are anything but alone:

“We are all in the last analysis, alone.  And this basic state of solitude is not something we have any choice about.  It is, as the poet Rilke says, ‘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 is it to realize that we are so.'”

Is there anything that fills us with more terror than being alone?  Most of us would do anything to avoid being by ourselves: we crowd our calendars with constant busyness, plans and parties; we stay in toxic relationships; we engage in empty-headed chatter and pointless conversations with people we don’t care about.  Indeed, when we have no choice but to be alone— all our friends are busy, we’re stuck sick at home— we seek solace in the hypnotizing blue light of our phones.  Rather than endure a single moment of soundlessness, we mindlessly scroll through social media in search of cheap entertainment.  We can’t imagine going on a walk without headphones or cleaning our apartment without a podcast playing in the background. 

In a 1955 passage that is perhaps even more timely today, Lindbergh laments our lost ability to sit still with the self:

“Naturally, how one hates to think of oneself as alone.  How one avoids it.  It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity.  An early wallflower panic still clings to the word.  One will be left, one fears, sitting in a straight-backed chair, alone while the popular girls are already chosen and spinning around the dance floor with their hot-palmed partners.  We seem so frightened today of being alone that we never let it happen.  Even if family, friends, and movies should fail, there is still the radio or television to fill up the void.  Women, who used to complain of loneliness, need never be alone any more.  We can do our house-work with soap-opera heroes at our side.  Even day-dreaming was more creative than this; it demanded something of oneself and it fed the inner life.  Now, instead of planting our solitude with our own dream blossoms, we choke the space with continuous music, chatter, and companionship to which we do not even listen.  It is simply there to fill the vacuum.  When the noise stops there is no inner music to take its place.”

Despite our distaste for our own company, artists and writers throughout time have understood that silence and solitude are the seedbeds of creativity.  The mind needs quiet time to imagine, to invent, to devise and to dream.  Magnanimous spirit Brenda Ueland believed inspiration most often visited in idle moments when we were alone and not doing much of anything (“The imagination needs moodling,— long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering,” she wrote in If You Want to Write, her middle finger to the capitalistic cult of productivity).  

Not only does alone time nurture the seeds of creativity, it is a means of solidifying the self.  In the pandemonium of day-to-day life, our desires and beliefs are drowned out by the ceaseless chatter of the world.  But in moments of introspection, we can define our own tastes, develop our own thoughts, make up our own minds about what matters most.  Solitude is a source of replenishment and renewal.  Like negative space in a painting, it brings balance to the composition of our lives and defines the boundaries of the soul.  Life remerges more vital, more vibrant when we’re alone:

“It is a difficult lesson to learn today — to leave one’s friends and family and deliberately practice the art of solitude for an hour or a day or a week.  For me, the break is the most difficult.  Parting is inevitably painful, even for a short time.  It is like an amputation, I feel.  A limb is being torn off, without which I shall be unable to function.  And yet once it is done, I find there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious.  Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before.  It is as if in parting one did actually lose an arm.  And then, like the starfish, one grows it anew: one is whole again, complete and round — more whole, even than before, when the other people had pieces of one.”  

What does it mean to be lonely?  Common belief says we’re lonely when we’re alone.  But as any one who has felt companionless despite being at a crowded party knows, loneliness has nothing to do with physical aloneness— loneliness is not an estrangement from others, but rather, an estrangement from self.

When we’re lonely, we feel like Robinson Crusoe, stranded on a deserted island far from our fellows.  If we want to cross the vast ocean of space between ourselves and other people (to “only connect” as E.M. Forester implored over a century ago), we must explore the frontier of the self.  We can only befriend others if we first befriend ourselves.  As Lindbergh writes:

“For it is not physical solitude that actually separates one from other men, not physical isolation, but spiritual isolation.  It is not the desert island nor the stony wilderness that cuts you off from the people you love.  It is the wilderness in the mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger.  When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too.  If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.  How often in a large city, shaking hands with my friends, I have felt the wilderness stretching between us.  Both of us were wandering in arid wastes, having lost the springs that nourished us— or having found them dry.  Only when one is connected to one’s core is one connected to others.”

How do we recenter ourselves when we feel pulled in a million directions by the world?  For Lindbergh, the solution is solitude.  No matter how seemingly indulgent, “every person, especially every woman, should be alone sometime during the year, some part of each week, and each day.”  In a genius reframing of Virginia Woolf’s feminist masterwork, Lindbergh declares all women must have “time of their own”:

“…the answer is not in the feverish pursuit of centrifugal activities which only lead in the end to fragmentation.  Women’s life today is tending more and more toward the state William James describes so well in the German word, ‘Zerrissenheit’— ‘torn-to-pieces-hood.’  She cannot live perpetually in ‘Zerrissenheit.’  She will be shattered into a thousand pieces.  On the contrary, she must consciously encourage those pursuits which oppose the centrifugal forces of today.  Quiet time alone, contemplation, prayer, music, a centering line of thought or reading, of study or work.  It can be physical or intellectual or artistic, any creative life proceeding from oneself.  It need not be an enormous project or great work.  But it should be something of one’s own.  Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day— like writing a poem, or saying a prayer.  What matters is that one be for a time inwardly attentive.”

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 1 Comment

Anne Morrow Lindbergh on Why We Should Shed the Shell of Our Ordinary Lives & Go on a Summer Trip to the Beach

It’s been one day since I returned home from vacation and I already miss the long, languid days at the beach, the seemingly endless, formless hours stretching before me.  Most of all, I miss the sense of freedom from obligation and duty.  Monday morning and I’m back to my normal routines: writing, teaching.  Serious adult duties like emails and meetings.

What is so vital about vacationing?  According to wise and warm-hearted Anne Morrow Lindbergh, a trip to a faraway place can give us much needed time to recharge.  In the cramped corners of life, we have little space: space to rest, space to reflect, space to relax, space to dream.  Most women’s lives are a “caravan of complications.”  We juggle careers along with raising children.  We grocery shop and meal plan.  We mop floors and clear out cabinets.  We do laundry.  We sew and mend clothing.  We carpool our kids to piano and choir and soccer practice.  We pay bills and make doctor’s appointments.  As Lindbergh writes, “to be a woman is to have interests and duties, raying out in all directions…like spokes from a wheel.”  

Lindbergh suggests a serene island retreat can help us cut down on distractions and regain balance in an unbalanced world.  In her lovely book Gift from the Sea, Lindbergh writes of her own restorative retreat at Captiva Island in the early 1950s.  Far removed from the million and one obligations of her everyday life as a wife and mother, Lindbergh could finally reflect on what really mattered.  The result?  A book of timeless meditations on simplicity and solitude, love and marriage, youth and age.The state of modern woman is fragmentation.  She is tugged in a thousand directions at home, at work, as a wife to her husband, as a mother to her children.  While she’s spreading blackberry jam on her toast in the morning, she’s not delighting in the dawn or the invigorating smell of fresh coffee— she’s frantically reminding her daughter to put her math homework in her backpack and rehearsing her presentation for that day’s meeting.

Just as Alain de Botton argues traveling to new places can inspire new thoughts, Lindbergh suggests a different setting— an island paradise (or secluded mountain cabin or cottage in the country)— can teach us to live differently.  Far from our routines, we act out of the ordinary.  Rather than worry about tomorrow or obsess about yesterday, we can finally appreciate today.  Under a sweltering summer sun and Caribbean blue sky, there is only us and the reassuring crash of the sea.

On her holiday, Lindbergh finds immense peace in being an island, disconnected from the “real” world and cut off from the pressures of day-to-day living:

“How wonderful are islands!  Islands in space, like this once I have come to, ringed about by miles of water, linked by no bridges, no cables, no telephones.  An island from the world and the world’s life.  Island’s in time, like this short vacation of time.  The past and future are cut off; only the present remains.  Existence in the presence gives island living an extreme vividness and purity.  One lives like a child or a saint in the immediacy of here and now.  Every day, every act, is an island, washed by time and space, and has an island’s completion.  People, too, become like islands in such an atmosphere, self-contained, whole, serene.”

For Lindbergh, a sojourn to the sea can teach us the value of simplicity.  In the ordinary world, our lives are endlessly complicated: we have countless possessions, countless things on the calendar, countless responsibilities.  But on a beach with a small suitcase and an empty planner, we rediscover a sense of serenity.  Like a prisoner of war or monk in a monastery, we realize we don’t need much to be happy.  If we are to bring this repose to our regular lives, we must simplify.  We must ask, as Lindbergh does with lyrical lucidity, “how little, not how much, can [we] get along with.  To say— is it necessary?— when [we] are tempted to add one more accumulation to [our lives], when [we are] pulled toward one more centrifugal activity.”