Work-Life Balance is Illusive, but Progress is Within Reach

The Wisdom of Anne Morrow Lindbergh

We talk about work-life balance as though it is a trendy concept that we can solve. We are taught to work hard, climb the corporate (or entrepreneurial) ladder, get to the gym four times a week, and have a healthy diet. Oh, and get a good night’s sleep, keep our spouse happy, take care of the kids, and meditate daily.

Or, as the perfume commercial from the 1970s goes, “I can bring home the bacon. Fry it up in the pan. And never let you forget you’re a man.” It was an absurd commercial with a nauseating message.

Have you given up on attaining work-life balance?

Don’t give up, but you may need to change your expectations. Or, make them more granular.

I retired from my financial career two years ago, and my daily routine has changed drastically. It is much less chaotic, although I still struggle with writing, exercising, finding purpose, and squeezing everything into my day. I attribute it to my workaholic personality. And to the fact that my transition to retirement has not been a smooth one.

While running a successful financial planning firm for over 20 years, I repeatedly hit my head against the wall, trying to attain work-life balance. I hired business coaches, who advised me to hire more people. The added staff was supposed to help me reduce my work hours, but it failed. Managing the staff required more hours at the office. (This was in the early 2000s, before virtual employees became prevalent.)

I took drastic measures—and sold my firm in 2007—in an attempt to spend more time with my daughters and husband. My plan was to spend time writing my first book at home. The plan backfired when my teenage daughters let me know (in no uncertain terms) that they didn’t want me around the house. I accomplished my goal of spending fewer hours at the office, but I failed miserably at improving my relationship with my daughters. My takeaway from this experience was twofold: (1) teenage daughters may not cooperate (after all, they are teenagers exerting their independence), and (2) perhaps my goal should have been to work on my book at an office, while also spending more time at home. The change from spending 10 hours a day (M-F) and weekends at the office to being home full-time was too drastic, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

One deliberate action that worked well was to start a new financial planning firm (after honoring a two-year non-compete requirement), with a drastically different business model than my prior firm. I set strict boundaries on the number of clients I would accept, and had only a part-time virtual staff person to help with back-office tasks. I still often worked long hours, but I was far happier with the life-style business model. As an added benefit, the new firm was far more profitable, and clients loved it. They knew I was keeping my firm small, and they trusted that I was serving them as a financial expert and a fiduciary. Setting boundaries (for the number of clients I would accept) improved my work-life balance. I was doing work I loved, but I was able to be home with my family most evenings and weekends.

My second business model (small but mighty) is similar to people moving away from a corporate job to an entrepreneurial business, such as writing online, or selling their expertise and services online. I am amazed at the talent and generosity of many writers on Substack and Medium. Working for yourself may not always equate with fewer work hours, but it provides many other benefits.

Get Granular

In your quest for work-life balance, I encourage you to ponder exactly what it is you are seeking. Our expectations are often too broad and unrealistic. Breaking down the concept of work-life balance into smaller components will help you devise strategies for your specific goals.

Do you want to:

1.???? Work fewer hours?

2.???? Be more profitable?

3.???? Improve the relationship with your spouse or kids?

4.???? Feel more personal satisfaction from your work?

5.???? Have more free-time for family, friends, exercise, hobbies, etc.?

6.???? Something else?

We Can Learn from the Wisdom of a Visionary

Work-life balance is not a new dilemma. Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote the classic book Gift from the Sea in 1954 when Anne was 48, while spending two weeks in a cottage on an isolated beach on Captiva Island off the gulf coast of Florida. Her book—which is almost 70 years old—is about her search for balance in a life filled with chaos.

Anne begins the book by stating:

“I began these pages for myself, in order to think out my own particular pattern of living, my own individual balance of life, work, and human relationships. And since I think best with a pencil in my hand, I started naturally to write.”

Initially, she thought other women did not share her desire, “to evolve another rhythm with more creative pauses in it, more adjustment to their individual needs, and new and more alive relationships to themselves as well as others.”

After returning to her home in Connecticut, she started discussing the issue with women and men, and discovered that many people shared her dreams. She decided to share her thoughts, which became the seemingly-timeless Gift from the Sea, which was published in 1955. When I read it, I am amazed at the honesty in her writing, and her creativity in connecting a sea shell with a concept she is contemplating.

The Channelled Whelk

My favorite part of the book is her chapter on the channelled whelk, which she uses to contemplate simplicity. She tells us the shell was originally inhabited by a whelk, a snail-like creature. After it died, a little hermit crab moved in, but it ran away, leaving Anne his shell. She describes the shell as simple, bare, and beautiful; only as large as her thumb. She states:

“I too have run away. I have shed the shell of my life, for these few weeks of vacation.”

Anne describes her shell (her life) as untidy, with a “husband, five children, and a home beyond the suburbs of New York”. She lists the many demands that she juggles, from caring for her modern home, the needs of the children (education, medical appointments, sports, music, tutoring, camps, carpools), and endless social commitments. She does not mention any details pertaining to her husband or her children. Clearly, she considered some areas of her life to be off-limits.

While comparing her lifestyle to the simple channelled whelk shell she found, Anne is not looking to escape from her life or her responsibilities. She states she wants “to be at peace with myself.”

She wants “to live ‘in grace’ as much of the time as possible…By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony.” Rather than a life of simplicity (which she seeks), she describes her life as one of multiplicity and complication. “It does not bring grace; it destroys the soul.”

In today’s terms we may describe her as “burned out” or depleted. Many of us often feel like we are on a hamster wheel, running faster and faster, but getting nowhere. We would like to slow down our pace, and learn to savor a simpler lifestyle. The illusion seems out of reach.

A Strategy of Acceptance

Anne does not resolve her dilemma, so there is not a neat, tidy ending with five recommendations as bullet points. She accepts that there is not an easy solution, and she is content to ponder and make small changes. She commits to cut out some of the detractions in her life when she returns home, and to find periods of “solitude and retreat.”

After contemplating simplicity, Anne moves on to other topics, such as relationships, marriage, family, and solitude. Her book is filled with wisdom.

Reading a good book is a delight. A book that compels me to reread it every few years is a treasure.

I read this book for the first time over 20 years ago, and I have reread it several times. Initially I did not know the backstory to Anne’s life. I knew she was married to Charles Lindbergh, and I knew their youngest child had been kidnapped and murdered when a baby. I knew Charles was a famous aviator, but not much more. Learning more about her family helped me understand the angst Anne must have felt as she wrote about seeking simplicity, solitude, and peace during her two weeks on Captiva Island.

The Backstory

Anne was born in June 1906. Her father was Dwight Morrow, who was a partner at J.P. Morgan & Co. She married Charles Lindbergh in May of 1929 when she was 22 years old. They had their first child, Charles Lindbergh, Jr., in June of 1930. He was kidnapped from the second story of their New Jersey home on March 1, 1932 when he was 20 months old. A ransom of $50,000 was paid on April 2 in gold certificates, which were soon to be withdrawn from circulation. The serial numbers of the bills (certificates) were recorded, and the plan was that cashing them would attract attention, leading them to the kidnapper. The plan failed, and the baby was brutally murdered. His body was found 72 days later. His killer (Richard “Bruno” Hauptmann) was not found until September 19, 1934 when he used one of the bills to buy gasoline. Sufficient evidence of the crime was found at his home. He was convicted in January of 1935, and died in the electric chair on April 3, 1936. When the baby was kidnapped Anne was pregnant with their second child.

Due to the stress and unrelenting public attention following the kidnapping, murder, and conviction, Anne, Charles, and their second son, Jon, fled to Europe in December of 1935. They returned to the US in 1939. After the death of their first child, they had five more children.

Charles was born in 1902. His father was a US Congressman. He joined the US Army in 1924 and was promoted to colonel in 1927. On May 20-21, 1927, he made the first solo non-stop trans-Atlantic flight from New York City to Paris. He was Time magazine’s first “Man of the Year” in 1928. In the early years of World War II, he was accused of being a Nazi sympathizer because he opposed U.S. military intervention. He resigned from the army in 1941 after Franklin Roosevelt publicly admonished him for his early opposition to the war. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he supported the war and flew 50 combat missions as a civilian consultant. In 1954 Dwight Eisenhower restored his commission and promoted him to Brigadier General in the US Air Force Reserve. He later became a Pulitzer-Prize winning author, an environmentalist, an inventor, and an international explorer. He helped establish national parks throughout the U.S. and he was involved in protecting endangered species. He died at age 72 on the island of Maui, Hawaii on August 26, 1974.

In addition to raising their five children, Anne was an accomplished writer and an aviator. In 1930 she became the first woman to receive a U.S. glider pilot license. During the early 1930s she assisted Charles as a co-pilot and radio operator on many of his flights. She later wrote poetry and nonfiction. She received numerous awards for her books, which included North to the Orient, Listen! The Wind, and War Within and Without.

In 2001 it was revealed that Charles Lindbergh had a secret life that began in 1957. He became involved in what was termed “lengthy sexual relationships” with three women in Europe. He fathered three children with one woman, and two each with two other women, for a total of seven more children. He used a false name when he visited the children. Ten days before he died, he wrote letters to all three women, imploring them to keep his identity as the father of the children secret, and they did. However, the daughter of one of the women solved the mystery (who was her father?) and confronted her mother in the 1990s. Although the mother confirmed her daughter’s suspicion, she made her agree to keep the secret until after the mother died, which occurred in 2001. After her mother’s death, the daughter found photographs and over 150 love letters from Lindbergh. She arranged DNA tests for herself and her two siblings, and the secret was revealed.

The seven children he fathered out of wedlock were born between 1958 and 1967. Anne’s trip to Captiva Island was in 1954, which was before Charles began fathering additional children in Europe. It is unclear when (or if) Anne learned of his secret relationships, but she remained married to him until his death.

Anne died on February 7, 2001 at the age of 94. Three of his out-of-wedlock children wrote a book in 2005 titled The Double Life of Charles A. Lindbergh, but it is only available in German. Of the five children that Anne and Charles had (after the death of their first child), Jon died at age 88, Anne died at age 53, Land is currently age 87, Scott is 82, and Reeve is age 78. All of the children lead very private lives, but Reeve wrote a beautiful introduction for the 50th anniversary edition of Gift from the Sea. She is a writer living in Vermont.

Now that I know more of the backstory to the lives of Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Charles Lindbergh, it is impossible to prevent that history from impacting my reading of Anne’s words. The notoriety surrounding Charles Lindbergh in the late 1920s, the tragedy of their son’s kidnapping and murder in the early 1930s, and Charles’ fall from grace—due to his non-intervention view on World War II—in the early 1940s, provides a basis for her strong desire to find balance and solitude. She states that she finds social life exhausting, and describes it as wearing a mask that she wants to shed.

What was Left Unsaid?

Anne’s book is logical, and I can relate to her writing style. By being reserved, it teaches us the value of introspection. If it were written in today’s style, I suspect it would be more emphatic, clearly describing the dysfunction and unreasonable demands she experienced in her everyday life. Perhaps she would describe what her life was truly like—caring for five children, being married to a “man about town”, managing her own career, and being pulled in too many directions. Maybe she didn’t want us to know the ugly details. Or, maybe she thought those details would ruin her book. Perhaps her gentler approach is better.

Takeaways from Gift from the Sea

This book is as relevant today as it was when Anne wrote it 70 years ago. Her journey was difficult. She teaches us:

·????? that pondering a future with balance is worthwhile

·????? that carving out time for creativity is important

·????? that making small changes is enough

·????? that solitude is good for the soul

·????? that you deserve to be high on your priority list

·????? that having a writing career while raising five children is possible

·????? that our identity does not need to be defined by our children or our spouse

·????? that writing down our thoughts is beneficial

·????? to respect and enjoy nature

·????? to aim to live “in grace”

I am grateful that Anne shared her wisdom with us. She realized that she was only capable of small steps toward balance and “living in grace”, but she accepted that as progress. I recommend you read (or reread) her book, so you will benefit from her insight.

Thank you, Anne Morrow Lindbergh!

Expecting to attain a glorified image of work-life balance is setting ourselves up for failure. Taking a small step—and feeling satisfaction when you see progress—will feel great.

So, what tiny component of work-life balance will you choose?

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Sources:

1.???? Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 50th Anniversary Edition, Pantheon Books, a Division of Random House, Inc. 1955, 2005.

2.???? Wikipedia

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