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.”

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.”

Alain De Botton on Luxury as a Restorative Form of Self-Care

What is luxury?  To some, luxury is synonymous with caviar, champagne and chandeliers.  To others, luxury calls to mind diamonds and pearls.  To still others, it’s wrapped in fancy cars and fur stoles.

Regardless of how we conceive of luxury, most of us believe the “good life” is something reserved for other people.  Only the wealthy can bear the expense of a $10,000 a night villa and afford Christian Louboutin shoes and Veuve Clicquot Brut Yellow Label.  How could we, ordinary common people with five figure salaries and overdue credit card bills, ever taste luxury’s celebratory bubbles?

luxury final #2

In his eye-opening A More Exciting Life, paradigm-shifting British philosopher Alain de Botton argues we don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to pamper ourselves.  Anyone can elevate the everyday regardless of the status of their bank account.  “We too often forget,” de Botton writes, “especially on our sadder and more restricted days…that the core pleasures of luxury also exist in small forms that can be accessed at a far more manageable cost.”

Luxury doesn’t have to be a first-class plane ticket or a taffeta bungalow— it can be a bottle of perfume, a sleek black and white candle, an impossibly soft pair of cashmere socks, a silk robe.  Luxury can be as affordable as an ivy plant for the windowsill, as simple as adding freshly shaved chocolate to our hot cocoa.

Are many luxurious things beyond our bank account?

Of course, obviously most of us can’t justify daily massages and summers along the Amalfi coast but that doesn’t mean we can’t find similar qualities of pleasure and beauty in our lives as they’re constituted now.

Say we want Yves Saint Laurent’s latest shoulder bag because it captivates us with its smooth black calfskin and streamlined design.  We might not be able to afford its hefty $2,000 price tag, but we can find just as much elegance and sophistication in the brand’s lipstick for $38.99.  

Or maybe we long for the immaculately designed multi-million dollar homes in Vogue and Elle.  Rather than max out our credit cards, we can find small ways to elevate our home.  Love the clean, simple lines of mid-century modern design?  We might not be able to afford a vintage velvet coach or an entirely new dining table but we can certainly treat ourselves to a Picasso print or a chic 1960s vase from our local thrift store.

After an exhausting few months of work, we might dream of getting away for awhile— to a remote cabin in the woods, perhaps, or a serene Greek spa.  We might not be able to bake in a sauna in Santorini but we can recreate some semblance of a spa in our own homes: we can light candles, pour ourselves our finest glass of wine, play a soothing Beethoven sonata and submerge ourselves in a blissful bath of sweet-scented bubbles.  If we want to restore our bodies and replenish our souls— de Botton suggests— we don’t have to flock to a Greek spa halfway across the world; we can transform our bathroom into an oasis of calm as long as we pay attention to detail.

chanel shopping bags

But all this begs the question: isn’t a love of luxury materialistic?  showy and superficial?  Aren’t there more important things we should concern ourselves with, the declining middle class, for example, or the impending threat of global warming or the millions of starving children across the world?

Though our culture condemns the pursuit of pleasure as hopelessly shallow (if not downright immoral), we should prioritize luxury for the sole reason that it can comfort and console.  Life rarely goes as it’s supposed to: our marriage ends, we never achieve our dream of becoming a Broadway star.  Our day-to-day is defined by great catastrophes— death, divorce— and seemingly small but equally dispiriting difficulties— a self-centered mother, a moody sister, a demanding boss.  During the span of a single day, we have to endure countless disappointments and humiliations: we might get beat out for a promotion, leave the office and find we got a $200 parking ticket, lose our favorite coat, and return home only to be the object of our husband’s derision and ridicule.

Because the world cares nothing for us, we must be kind and care for ourselves.  A glass of champagne or Gucci loafers won’t completely cure our ills but they can certainly cheer us when life is cruel.