Time & Perspective Quote by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“The wave of the future” is a soothing metaphor with a hard edge: it frames change as nature, not politics. Anne Morrow Lindbergh isn’t arguing for a particular program so much as insisting on a posture - stop shadowboxing the tide. The line works because it borrows the authority of inevitability. A wave doesn’t negotiate, doesn’t care if you’re ready, doesn’t pause for nostalgia. By choosing that image, Lindbergh quietly demotes human will from driver to swimmer.

The subtext is both bracing and a little dangerous. “There is no fighting it” can read as pragmatic counsel: conserve your energy, adapt, learn to steer rather than resist. But it also carries a subtle absolution, the way inevitability talk often does. If the future is a force of nature, then the people pushing it - governments, industries, charismatic leaders - get to hide behind the weather report. History becomes surf conditions.

Context matters because Lindbergh lived through an era when “the future” arrived loudly: aviation shrinking distance, mass media reshaping attention, war mechanizing death, women renegotiating public and private roles. Her writing often returns to balance, interior life, and the costs of modern acceleration. Read that way, the sentence isn’t starry-eyed futurism; it’s an acknowledgment that modernity has momentum, and the only real choice is whether you meet it with skill or get knocked under. The quiet sting is that resistance may feel noble, but it can also be a refusal to learn how the world now works.