More from Gift From The Sea: "Life today in America is based on the premise of ever-widening circles of contact and communication. It involves not only family demands, but community demands, national demands, international demands on the good citizen, through social and cultural pressures, through newspapers, magazines, radio programs, political drives, charitable appeals, and so on. My mind reels with it. What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives. It puts the trapeze artist to shame. Look at us.
We run a tight rope daily, balancing a pile of books on the head.
This is not the life of simplicity but the life of multiplicity that the wise men warn us of. It leads not to unification but to fragmentation. It does not bring grace, it destroys the soul. And this is not only true of my life. I am forced to conclude, it is the life of millions of women in America. I stress America, because today, the American woman more than any other has the privilege of choosing such a life.
Woman in large parts of the civilized world has been forced back by war, by poverty, by collapse, by the sheer struggle to survive, into a smaller circle of immediate time and space, immediate family life, immediate problems of existence. The American woman is still relatively free to choose the wider life."
She really knows how to nail a problem, doesn't she? I'm truly glad that we American women have choices, but for me, I have to choose simplicity. When I widen my circle too much, I get fragmented and frazzled. None of my pieces are beneficial to anyone. If I want to be whole, I must have a simple life, and that mostly means staying at home.
Ever since school has been out and I've been able to stay home more, the difference has been amazing! I'm much calmer and can actually complete a thought. Maybe I even get to write it down in a journal or blog post. This is the way I need/want to live.
I'm going to spend July and the first two weeks of August getting my heels dug in so that when school starts I can hang on to this way of life.
And to think Anne wrote her book BEFORE the internet and social media were invented. I wonder what her book would say if it were written now?
No comments:
Post a Comment