Since “The Gift from the Sea” is really about Lindbergh’s musings on midlife and beyond, it’s a perfect coaching companion for a trip to Baja. Here’s an excerpt about how we distract ourselves way before we had digital devices (1955):
“With our garnered free time, we are more apt to drain our creative springs than to refill them. With our pitchers, we attempt sometimes to water a field, not a garden. We throw ourselves indiscriminately into committees and causes. Not knowing how to feed the spirit, we muffle to its demands in distractions. Instead of still the center, the axis of the wheel, we add more centrifugal activities to our lies – which tend to grow us off balance.”
And, here’s a rumination on how middle age is the time to depart from one’s shell as we’ve outgrown it:
“I am very fond of the oyster shell. It is humble and awkward and ugly. It is slate-colored and unsymmetrical. Its form is not primarily beautiful but functional. I make fun of its knobbiness. But its tireless adaptability and tenacity draw my astonished admiration and sometimes even my tears. And it is comfortable in its familiarity, its homeliness, like old garden gloves which have moulded themselves perfectly to the shape of the hand. I do not like to put it down. I will not want to leave it.
But is it the permanent symbol of marriage? Should it last forever? The tide of life recedes. The house, with its bulging sleeping porches and sheds, begins little by little to empty. The children go away to school and then to marriage and lives of their own. Most people by middle age have attained, or ceased to struggle to attain, their place in the world. That terrific tenacity to life, to place, to people, to material surroundings and accumulations – is it necessary as it was when one was struggling for one’s security or the security of one’s children? Does the shell need to be so welded to the rock? Married couples are apt to find themselves in middle age, high and dry in an outmoded shell, in a fortress which has outlived its function. What is one to do – die or atrophy in an outstripped form? Or move on to another form, other experiences?
Perhaps middle age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells, the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego. Perhaps one can shed at this stage in life as one sheds in beach-living; one’s pride, one’s false ambitions, one’s mask, one’s armor. Was that armor not put on to protect one from the competitive world? If one ceases to compete, does one need it? Perhaps one can at least in middle age, if not earlier, be completely oneself. And what a liberation that would be!”
And, finally, here’s a lamentation of the American culture venerating youth, even back in the mid-1950s:
“The primitive, physical, functional pattern of the morning of life, the active years before forty or fifty, is outlived. But there is still the afternoon opening up, which one can spend not in the feverish pace of the morning but in having time at last for those intellectual, cultural and spiritual activities that were pushed aside in the heat of the race. We Americans, with our terrific emphasis on youth, action and material success, certainly tend to belittle the afternoon of life and even to pretend it never comes. We push the clock back and try to prolong the morning, overreaching and overstraining ourselves in the unnatural effort. We do not succeed, of course. We cannot compete with our sons and daughters. And what a struggle it is to race with these overactive and under-wise adults! In our breathless attempts we often miss the flowering that awaits for afternoon.
For is it not possible that middle age can be looked upon as a period of second flowing, second growth, even a kind of second adolescence? It is true that society in general does not help one accept this interpretation of the second half of life. And therefore this period of expanding is often tragically misunderstood.
Many people never climb above the plateau of forty-to-fifty. The signs that presage growth, so similar, it seems to me to those in early adolescence: discontent, restlessness, doubt, despair, longing are interpreted falsely as signs of decay. In youth one does not as often misinterpret the signs, one accepts them, quite rightly, as growing pains…But in middle age, because of the false assumption that it is a period of decline, one interprets these life-signs, paradoxically, as signs of approaching death…One tries to cure the signs of growth, to exorcise them, as if they were devils, when really they might be angels of annunciation.”
Imagine spending part of this summer reading literature like this on a beautiful beachfront with all of your healthy meals cared for and an ability to tap into classroom time on writing, learning Spanish, or getting fit and healthy. That’s what our Summer Immersion Series in Baja is all about and if you stay for two weeks, the second two weeks are free. Imagine kicking back and reading in a hammock.
-Chip