Advice on Relationships and Creating Inner Peace in Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift From The Sea

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In Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh shares her thoughts on relationships, love, inner peace, and contentment. During her vacation by the sea to relax and detach herself from the hectic outside world, Lindbergh masterfully provides insights to a reader of any age or gender. Her poetic and flowing style allows the reader to easily absorb the themes from her meditations. She warns against the pitfalls of modern life because of what she calls hectic rhythm, as opposed to a more fluid and natural primeval rhythm. By removing herself from the outside world, she is able to look at life, love, and relationships from a different perspective. Also, she allows the natural world to help her make connections. She provides advice on how to treat our relationships with other people, and our ever evolving relationship with the outside world.

Although the words are almost fifty years old, Gift from the Sea still speaks powerfully about humanity. Using metaphors of different kinds of shells she finds on the beach, she talks about solitude and the distracted lives we lead. Along the way, she shares meditations about life that are simple yet profound. She advocates a simple life that cuts out the excesses – the things that clutter and complicate our lives. “Simplification of outward life is not enough. It is merely the outside. But I am starting with the outside. I am looking at the outside of my life – the shell. The complete answer is not to be found on the outside, in an outward mode of living. This is only a technique, a road to grace. The final answer, I know, is always inside.” In her explanation of simplification, she explains that there are two types of rhythm – hectic and primeval. Hectic rhythm is when someone is une...

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...g however, there have been a few questions that have begun to surface in my mind. Why do some things in our lives cause us stress, something as simple as looking in the mirror too much? Why are we islands, and why shouldn’t we strive to be with people all the time? With these questions and the different thoughts that come alive within me, I begin to have a clearer understanding of myself, and what I believe. Through this book, I have been provoked to thought; to a consciousness I have never felt before. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, through her eloquent and poetic style, has brought me to enjoy meditating on the issues in my life. She has brought an inner peace to my life that I have never felt. It has allowed me to go on a vacation to the sea. It has allowed me to absorb the timeless lessons she offered. I hope you choose to go along on the journey with her too.

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