I’ve returned to an old practice: writing letters. There were times and years in my life when I lived distant and apart from many that I loved. I never said much over a phone, and the emotions, thoughts, and affinities I held within never seemed to speak—unless I wrote them down. Back then, I wrote of sights, adventures, experiences—training, deployments, war—and intertwined, I always shared what I believe and sense still are the greater points of this human experience: affinity for others, gratitudes, loneliness and missing; hopes, dreams, futures; that which we all live and will to share or hide within. Without writing, my truest self stayed hidden.
Today, surrounded by a family I love and that reciprocates the same to me, there are times I still feel lonely, distant, think on those who are not near or that I have not seen or spoken to for some time. And even in the company of those who love me, I find the good and gratitudes I wish to say too often pass unshared, soul-expressions left unsaid, because I never wrote them out.
So, I’m returning to an old enjoyment, a medium of self-expresion that in today’s age of immediacy is rarely sought and dismissed for the ease and speed of a text, message, post, or whatever other way to say “I thought of you.”
Maybe we could all use a slowdown, a letter now and then, a hand-mark of humanness and personal in a world of collective and divided groups that, within, all seem the same.
With pen, I write a quick sentiment, share a good wish, knowing it will be days—if ever—before it is received. I address an envelope and send it away hoping the offering of a small and unrequested word might lift another’s day as the writing of it—to them,–did for me.
In a world of digital and synthetic closeness, perceived knowing of another that is really understanding nothing of them at all, I wonder: who else could use a letter, a few words to say and show they are thought of by another; that thy are worth a moment, time, and the effort to say they are valued in this world?
“I thought of you and just wanted to write and say I believe you are good, and I am grateful for your presence.”
Who wouldn’t want that? To whom else might something so small matter and make a difference in a day?
Such little things matter to me, and that is why I write.
“Who else could use a letter?”
Some days, couldn’t we all?