Simplification of Life
May 14, 2026
SIMPLIFICATION OF LIFE
Picking up a book on my bedside table, Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, its my 3rd or 4th read. It hits on all the cords of my life - maybe yours also. Read it below, in part two on a simple life.
“I mean to lead a simple life, to choose a simple shell I can carry easily-like a hermit crab. But I do not. I find that my frame of life does not foster simplicity. My husband and five children must make their way in the world. The life I have chosen as a wife and mother entrains a whole caravan of complications. It involves a house in the suburbs and either household drudgery or household help which wavers between scarcity and non-existence for most of us. It involves food and shelter; means, planning, marketing, bills and making the ends meet in a thousand ways.
It involves not only the butcher, the baker, the candlestickmaker but countless other experts to keep my modern house with its modern ‘simplifications’ (electricity, plumbing, refrigerator, gas-stove, oil burner, dish-washer, radios, car and numerous other labor-saving devices) functioning properly. It involves health; doctors, dentists, appointments, medicine, cod-live oil, vitamins, trips to the drugstore. It involves education, spiritual, intellectual, physical; schools, school conferences, car-pools, extra trips for basket-ball or orchestra practice; tutoring; camps, camp equipment and transportation. It involves clothes, shopping, laundry, cleaning, mending, letting skirts down and sowing buttons on, or finding someone else to do it. It involves friends, my husband’s, my children’s, my own, and endless arrangement to get together; letters, invitations, telephone calls and transportation hither and yon ...
This is not the life of simplicity but the life of multiplicity. That the wise men warn us of. It leads bot to unification but to fragmentation. It does not bring grace; it destroys the soul.”
If you’ve enjoyed the wisdom shared on this blog and have taken anything from it, I’ve created a new blog, for those raising children, “Keys of a Father.” Where I capture my experience as a Father of two. In addition, using books and other material to make parenting and raising our kids better. This blog is for: expecting or current parents. Step, Co., Grand, and foster parents. For adoptive parents, teachers and coaches. For those one day wanting to be parents or for those that want to parent themselves. Check it out below.
