Just recently I lost all of my emails. They just disappeared! Fortunately Google has a way to restore them, but there’s a catch. It restores all your emails from the past years. It restored all of mine, all 24,000 of them! Oh my! That’s a LOT of correspondence and most of them were ones that I had no interest in. It took many hours to save the ones I wanted.
I also own a box of about 200 handwritten letters. These I do want. They are a treasure of love letters written between my mom and dad during World War II. Tenderly saved by my mother, they have survived the years telling many stories that I would never have heard without them. Both my mother and father are gone from this earth but when I hold a page that their hands held, they come back to to me.
That’s the magic of handwritten letters. They bring a person or a place back to you, much the same way a photograph does.
“A good handwritten letter is a creative act, and not just because it is a visual and tactile pleasure. It is a deliberate act of exposure, a form of vulnerability, because handwriting opens a window on the soul in a way that cyber communication can never do. You savor their arrival and later take care to place them in a box for safe keeping.” Catherine Fields
Maybe it’s time to fall in love with the art of “slow communication”.
