Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

But however much the diet may differ between us, one thing is fairly certain: we usually select the known, seldom the strange. All hors d’oeuvres and no meat or all sweets and no vegetables, depending on the kind of people we are. The difficulty with big city environment is that if we select-and we must in order to live and breathe and work in such crowded conditions-we tend to select people like ourselves, a very monotonous diet. But thrown together on this island of living, we stretch to understand each other and are invigorated by the stretching. We never would have chosen these neighbors life chose them for us. “Out of the welter of life, a few people are selected for us by the accident of temporary confinement in the same circle. ― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, quote from Gift from the Sea 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.” 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. The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. 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. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. “When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment.

Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh