Reflection: The Lost Art of Letter Writing
Even though I pretty much write every day, I miss writing letters.
I realize I'm dating myself here, but when I'm talking about “writing letters” I'm talking about the old fashioned kind where you got out a piece of paper and you wrote something on it to a friend — with a pen — and then stuck it in an envelope put of stamp on it and mailed it.
In most cases, it would take a few days for the letter to reach the person you'd written it to, and then it would take a few days for that person to read it and decide what to write back, and then it will take another couple of days before the letter with the reply made its way back to you.
That was the way of things went, for hundreds of years until the invention of email.
When I was little, we traveled a lot and we're often in a variety of foreign countries. ”Sending letters home” was sort of an exciting part of being abroad; describing sights and sounds to people back home who likely would never get to go where we were traveling.
Of course, like most people, I stopped writing letters when email became the most common way we communicate with each other. Although, to be entirely fair, much of the email I used to write to friends back in Europe was written in a very similar style to my handwritten letters.
One of the things I've noticed — perhaps because I am a writer by trade — is it my entire writing style changed when we started using email every day.
Neuroscientists have even studying this phenomenon, and have concluded that we use a different part of our brains to type on a keyboard as compared to the part of our brains we use when we write longhand. Typing is a repetitive mechanical motion — much like running on a treadmill — which uses the exact same movements over and over again, while writing by hand draws on the same part of the brain we used to create art.
That's one of the reasons many great authors like to write their rough drafts by longhand rather than typing or as it were now, typing on a computer keyboard.
With all that said, what I miss most about letter writing is not so much the actual writing itself, as the fact that it was a very deliberate and slow process. When writing by hand, you truly ”crafted” what you wanted to say and there was a certain amount of creativity involved because — unlike with a computer email — there was no going back and sending a few more lines saying ”oh, I also meant to mention this.”
And then you had to be patient. You waited for your words to make their way across the world, and then for the response to end up back in your mailbox.
Which brings me to the last bit that I sort of miss. And that part is the way a written letter represented a sort of ”physical evidence” of the other person's life. I found some old letters my mom had written to me, some 20 years ago... she passed away over a decade ago. That is very different from email!
Yes, I realize I'm getting old. I look at our grandkids common the oldest of them is now 11 years old, and I realize that he has probably never set foot in the post office... except maybe to pick up a package delivery with his dad. He has never lived in the world that did not have email and text messaging.
And so it goes with many ways of our lives. The old things fade away into the mists of history and we take on new ways of doing things, usually without much fanfare. In another 50 years, who knows? Will we even be sending pahysical birthday cards anymore? Christmas cards?
I don't know. And I'm pretty certain I will not be here to discover for myself.
Thanks for reading and have a great remainder of your weekend!
How about YOU? Did you grow up with handwritten letters? Even if you use email for everything, do you miss getting handwritten letters in the mail? Or have you never lived in a time of handwritten letters? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
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Created at 20210501 22:47 PDT
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