Wit & Attitude Quote by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Anxiety, greed, impatience: Lindbergh lines them up like modern sins and then sends them offshore to drown. The sea in this passage is less nature writing than a calibrated moral instrument: vast, indifferent, and impossible to hustle. You cannot negotiate with tide and weather; you can only meet them with a temperament that won’t panic at uncertainty. That’s the quiet provocation here. She isn’t praising passivity so much as attacking the culture of insistence - the idea that wanting something hard enough, or fast enough, forces the world to comply.

The key phrase is “reward.” It smuggles in an old American assumption: effort should produce outcome. Lindbergh flips it. At sea, effort is necessary but never sufficient; competence matters, control doesn’t. The “gift” arrives on the sea’s terms, not yours. That’s why the image of being “choiceless as a beach” lands: it’s a renunciation of the constant micro-decisions that masquerade as agency. The beach doesn’t strategize; it receives, holds, and releases.

Context sharpens the edge. Lindbergh’s writing, especially in her mid-century work, often frames solitude and the natural world as antidotes to speed, noise, and acquisitive ambition. This is a writer speaking from an era when domestic life, public scrutiny, and national mythologies pressed hard on private interiority - and she answers with a philosophy of waiting that isn’t weak. It’s disciplined openness, a deliberate emptiness meant to make room for whatever isn’t for sale.