The Quest for a Balanced Life

On a recent trip to the beach I reacquainted myself with a simple, thin book that has been a source of inspiration I visit from time to time since I first read it over ten years ago. Gift from the Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, shares the author’s personal approach to the particular challenges for women in balancing the needs of self, family and the world.  Although first published in 1955, Lindbergh’s honest and down-to-earth perspective is relevant, and even refreshing, for women now.  From today’s tuned-in, turned-on lifestyles it may be hard to imagine that society of earlier generations also struggled with distractions and demands that interfered with inner peace and purposeful living.  Yet Anne Morrow Lindbergh, a wife and mother in public view in her day, describes perfectly the “ever widening circles of contact and communication.  It involves not only family demands, but community demands, national demands, international demands on the good citizens, through social and cultural pressures, through newspapers, magazines, radio programs, political drives, charitable appeals, and so on.”  I think she just described my day!  ​

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To be fair, the author recognizes that there are privileges as well as problems in the multiplicity of life in modern civilization and that these cut across gender lines.  In Gift from the Sea, Anne Lindbergh humbly offers her own endeavor to balance oversaturation with efforts at simplicity and solitude, describing a "swinging of the pendulum" type of process rather than an impossible to achieve mixture of the opposing conditions of engagement and retreat.  Many easily identify with this experience of extremes that characterize their daily lives amid the yearning for a perfect balance.  Through the author's words and personal search we may find a gift of inspiration for our own lives and our work-life balance.

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