Today, I’m posting an excerpt from one of my all-time
favorite books,
Gift From the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
Even though I first read the book a long time
ago, its words always remained with me and served me well in life.
I hope this has the
calming effect on you that it does me.
“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 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. Relationships 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, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea
