A wise friend told me that since the Age of Reason we’ve felt we had to explain everything, and that as a result we’ve forgotten the value of mystery. Here’s a poem by Lisel Mueller that celebrates mystery. Mueller is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet from Illinois. [Introduction by Ted Kooser.] 

Sometimes, When the Light 

Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles

and pulls you back into childhood

and you are passing a crumbling mansion

completely hidden behind old willows

or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks

and giant firs standing hip to hip,

you know again that behind that wall,

under the uncut hair of the willows

something secret is going on,

so marvelous and dangerous

that if you crawled through and saw,

you would die, or be happy forever.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©1980 by Lisel Mueller, from her most recent book of poems, Alive Together: New and Selected Poems, Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Poem reprinted by permission of Lisel Mueller and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2012 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.

Over lunch recently, a friend and I discussed why we don’t feel happier than we do. While we have the normal, everyday stresses most people have, we’re currently not coping with any major problems or crises. We figure our baseline level of happiness should be higher than it is. We weren’t complaining about it—just wondering why it was so. We felt like we should feel happier.

As I thought about this on my way home, I realized one reason could be that even though we don’t have any crises to deal with, we don’t have any major good things happening either. At this moment, our lives are filled with lots of work, a few annoyances and irritations, and not a lot of reward.

Reward. Perhaps that’s part of the key. We’re bulldozing through our tasks, not taking time to first notice and then reward our accomplishments and contributions. All work and no play make Jill an unhappy girl.

Most of us expect to bear a certain amount of responsibility and strive for achievement—after all, we’re grown ups, and grown ups take care of themselves and help others. However, when we don’t take time to notice and reward ourselves for what we accomplish, we risk burning out. If we wait for others to notice and reward, we’ll be waiting a long time. When was the last time someone complimented you for turning in a report on time, or even noticed that you mopped the kitchen floor? Just because something is expected of you doesn’t mean that it’s not worth rewarding. Most people I know tend to be pretty strict with themselves—work first (paid and non-paid), play/reward rarely…if ever.

I say it’s time to take rewards into our own hands, and to start doling them out liberally—to ourselves. Here are some basic principles to consider when thinking about rewards:

Behold the harvest:

This is why gardening and I are not the best of friends. I start off all filled with ambition and plans for delicious homegrown produce, and this is what I get:

Even though I love the feeling of picking vegetables and herbs from my own plants (a genuine simple pleasure), I am really not the world’s best gardener, and I think my time and money would be better spent by participating in a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) group. I’d like to think I have a green thumb, but the results prove otherwise.

Maybe I’ll stick to orchids.

Is there anything you would love to do better?

“Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us: There have been many circulations of the sap before we detect even the smallest sign of the bud,”

—George Eliot, Silas Marner

 I don’t remember how I discovered her writings, perhaps in my creative writing class in high school, but as a teenager, I was attracted to the romance of her life. She, a quiet, shy and studious girl, fell in love with dashing aviator (and “America’s most eligible bachelor”) Charles Lindbergh. Anne left behind her more privileged and intellectual background and embraced the action-filled life Charles lived. From the moment they announced their engagement, the media hounded them. The very private Anne Morrow became part of “America’s golden couple,” and the very public bride of a hero.

With Charles’ instruction and encouragement, Anne earned a private pilot’s license, and also eventually became the first woman to hold a first-class glider pilot’s license. These feats were unusual, because at the time women didn’t enter into “masculine” pursuits like aviation very often. She served as her husband’s radio operator, navigator and co-pilot on several long flights charting potential routes for commercial airlines. Eventually, Anne was the first woman awarded the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal for her duties as “crew” on two of these survey flights. These flights, in sometimes dangerous conditions in their single-engine airplane over uncharted air space, brought Anne and Charles closer and were some of their happiest times together. (Later in life, Anne received several more awards for her contributions to aviation.)

Anne and Charles had six children, though tragically, their first child, Charles Jr., was kidnapped and killed at the age of 18 months. For many years, Anne felt continually pulled between her roles—her diaries show a constant battle for time and space to write and think, all while raising children and accompanying Charles on many of his flights. As she writes in the introduction of Locked Rooms and Open Doors, “But on the other hand, the trip [an Atlantic survey flight], especially as it was prolonged for five and a half months, separated me from my child [their second son, Jon], the most healing and nourishing element in my life. It also crowded out any possibility of a quiet contemplative coming to terms with grief, for me a necessary inner process, and it meant a long interruption in the work I had just restarted of writing my book [North to the Orient].”

Despite the many demands on her time, Anne produced 13 books, including five volumes of diaries and letters. Her most famous book, Gift From the Sea, a collection of essays about women’s roles, was inspired by a vacation on Florida’s Captiva Island. North to the Orient, was 1935’s number one bestseller.

Despite a number of serious challenges to their relationship, Anne and Charles remained married until Charles’ death in 1974. Anne continued to write after his death, though she did not publish any more books.

I want to be like Anne Morrow Lindbergh in the sense that I fully enter into life while still retaining a sense of myself and my own work. She was able to move beyond her comfort zone and achieve more than she ever dreamed possible. It encourages me that she felt the same work/family tug of war I do, even though she lived in a different time and under different circumstances. I’m not alone in feeling torn between the needs of my family and my own ambitions.

I recently picked up a lovely copy of Gift From the Sea at my library’s bookstore—I’ll end this post with some of Anne’s words on the topic of solitude taken from it:

“For it is not physical solitude that actually separates one from other men, not physical isolation, but spiritual isolation. It is not the desert island nor the stony wilderness that cuts you off from the people you love. It is the wilderness in the mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger. When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others…. Only when one is connected to one’s own core is one connected to others, I am beginning to discover. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be refound through solitude.”

If you want to know more about Anne Morrow Lindbergh, check out Kathleen C. Winters’ biography, Anne Morrow Lindbergh: First Lady of the Air, or pick up one of Anne’s collections of diaries and letters.