On a dreary Tuesday morning, I walked downstairs to leave for my 8am class when I noticed an envelope in my mailbox. Excited as a five year old on Christmas morning, I fumbled for my keys, opened the mailslot, and pulled out a crisp envelope with my name and address on the front. This was one of dozens of cards that I have received throughout the school year, but I still get a little overly excited each time.
I opened the envelope to find a sweet note from a dear, dear friend of mine who goes to school several hours away. She gave me a quick update on her life and told me that she often tells her friends she has a friend who is “basically Taylor Swift”. A meaningful phrase was carefully written across the top and the note was signed in a familiar, extremely neat handwriting that I had enveyed for a few years.
In this day and age, where technology fills every corner of our lives and communication revolves around typed out words on a screen, there is something particularly special about receiving a handwritten letter in the mail. Maybe it’s the fact that they took time out of their day to pick out stationary, write a note, buy a stamp, and walk it to a mail center. Maybe it’s seeing something created by human hands, rather than the electrical wires inside of a machine. Maybe it’s the familiarity of a handwriting or the way words seem a little more alive when they are written in pen or the way your grandmother always includes a crisp $5 bill. And maybe it’s a combination of it all.
I try to set aside fifteen minutes a week to write someone a note. To let them know I’m thinking of them. To remind them that they are important in my life. It’s possible that I’m the only person in the world that still gets excited about getting mail at the age of nineteen. If that’s the case, the world is becoming a very dull place. I like to think optimistically, though. I think we all still get a twinge of excitement when we see our name scrawled across the front of an envelope with a stamp in the upper right hand corner. If fifteen minutes is all it takes to give someone that feeling, it’s fifteen minutes well spent.
Instead of starting your next episode of Grey’s Anatomy at 9pm, start it at 9:15 instead. Send your cousins or your grandpa or your friend from camp that you haven’t spoken to in 6 months a note. I think the world is changing one handwritten note at a time. Do you?