Thoughts on "Gift from the Sea"

I just finished reading "Gift from the Sea" by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, which I've been wanting to read for awhile because it's my Grandma's favorite book.  It's a double win to read the favorite book of a person you love and respect because it helps you understand them better and it's guaranteed to be a good read.  This book did not disappoint.  It's a tiny book packed with practical wisdom and beautiful prose.  Lindbergh encourages readers to simplify their lives and to make space for solitude, and she describes how marriage changes over time and why this is a good thing.  Her thoughts on simplicity and solitude made me think further --

Simplicity:  Lindbergh says that the more stuff you have, the more time / energy / money you will spend tending to your stuff, and at some point this is going to decrease your happiness.  I've been thinking about this lately because along with parenting comes an explosion of new stuff.  For example, we are now a five stroller family. Why in the world do we need *five* strollers?  Short answer:  for highly specialized purposes.  It's great to have a skinny little stroller that fits in the car for shopping trips, a sturdy jogging stroller for walks, a double stroller that can tote both kids at once, etc.;  But it also means that we need a living space big enough to store all these strollers, that we need to keep track of cleaning and maintaining 5 strollers (2 of them are now semi-busted), and that we need to think about which one goes where at any given time.  In some ways, it would be a lot easier to just pick the one most useful stroller and get rid of the others - it would certainly clear up physical space and it would probably clear up some mental space as well.  I'm not sure that strollers are the place where I'm actually going to apply this simplicity principle, but it's good to remember that having a bunch of material possessions can create mental drag as well as physical clutter.

Solitude:  The book encourages readers to regularly carve out time, free of people or distraction, where you can pursue creative / intellectual / spiritual projects.  As a shy introvert, I have no problem avoiding people (and in fact would like to do a lot less of that).  But I have a really hard time eliminating distractions.  When I get in the car, I immediately turn on the radio.  When I have a few minutes to myself, I usually spend it on Facebook.  (I'm not looking to trash Facebook here - sometime I will write a post about all the things I love about Facebook, since it seems to be getting a bad rap lately.)  It is so hard to sit in silence, or even to just focus intensely on one task without popping over to check e-mail, immediately reading the text that just came in, etc.  I have unintentionally bought into the idea that I need to be entertained every second, and I think it really fragments my mind and makes me more shallow.  So it was good to think about carving out space away from all the distractions.

Those were my main take-away points from "Gift from the Sea" and I would encourage anyone who's looking for a good book to check it out.  So now I'm looking for another good book to read.  Any favorite books that you want to share?