I don’t get much mail anymore. Well, I guess I never did get much mail. But I get even less now. I’m sure we have the digital world to thank for that. Thanks digital world. Thanks a lot. Now my mailbox AND my email box are BOTH full of useless junk.
I miss the days of the handwritten note. I enjoyed drawing little cartoons in the margins for whomever would receive my letter. Seems like we just don’t have time for that sort of thing anymore. The world moves too quickly. We expect our replies and responses to be instantaneous and immediate. In today’s world a day without an expected response could be interpreted as an insult or being completely ignored. We have no patience anymore. No anticipation. No wonder.
Remember when we were kids and we used to pass notes in school? Maybe you had one of those teenage romances where you would secretly hand notes to each other between classes. Remember the excitement that you’d feel as you couldn’t wait to read it when nobody else was looking? Remember how you couldn’t wait to get out a piece of paper and a pen and respond? Remember how you used to find clever and intricate ways to fold it up when you were finished? And how you used to artistically craft the name of the recipient on the front? It was beauty and wonder and art all at the same time.
Do kids still do that sort of thing? Or do they just text each other all day? I’m seriously asking–I don’t know. But if they’re not writing secret handwritten notes to each other they are seriously missing out. Some of my earliest skills as a writer were developed in such a fashion.
Sometimes I wish we could all slow down a little bit and pick up our pens and paper again. Technology is great…but there’s something more meaningful and exciting about a handwritten letter that took time and effort to write, and days to make the journey to your home. It carries with it an extra sort of power. You can feel it in it’s pages. You can see the words as they were truly written.
It just…feels better. And you can’t top that with 160 characters.