I wrote this article a few years ago for an e-magazine. In this season of gratitude, I thought it was worth digging it up and sharing again.
Perhaps it will inspire you to
- Find a few more things to be grateful for
- Recognize the impact of others on who you are today
- Pick up a pen and write a letter
I am grateful for you!
The Power of a Handwritten Letter
The first letter was written around 2500 years ago; the stamped letter that we know today arrived in 1840. Letters were the way that my family, just a generation or two ago, kept in touch across the miles. My father exchanged letters with his missionary parents in China from his boarding school in America. My brother and I exchanged letters with grandparents in Germany as we grew up.
Eventually, new technologies like email made it faster and more efficient to get information from one place to another… so the letters faded into the past.
A few years ago, I started writing handwritten letters because I was in a rut. I felt like I was checking off boxes for work, family, school, and friends. I was living on autopilot, getting the required activities done, yet not becoming a better version of myself. This mindless “progress” is easy to fall into when there is so much clamoring for our attention. We live in a culture where being busy has become a status symbol.
I tried journaling, but found that I struggled with “talking” to myself. I started meditating and thought about what I needed to nurture inside of myself to step out of the rut. I realized that what I wanted to grow inside myself were often the exact traits that I could see in so many people I already knew.
Over the course of a few months, I wrote to close to 75 friends, family, and even a few people that I had never met personally. I chose people that in some way made me a better person by their example.
Some letters were not easy to write as they brought up emotions and memories long forgotten.
Some were written to people already gone whose impact on my current life was undeniable. I am forever grateful for the impact that my brother had on my life. Writing him a letter was a way of sharing with him things I hadn’t said before he passed.
Some letters were written quickly and others after weeks of deliberation.
As I wrote more of them, I realized that each one impacted me differently and allowed me to grow in ways that I didn’t anticipate.
With a pen in my hand, suddenly, I was whirled back in time to elementary school and I was a child learning to write in cursive all over again. I remember focusing on the shape of the letters, making sure that my i’s were dotted and my t’s were crossed. I took those age-old lessons and brought them back with me to the present. Forming and connecting letters to create the words to express my thoughts helped me stay in the moment and meditate effectively.
Writing letters fostered a sense of gratitude inside of me. As I wrote each letter, I made a point of identifying two or three things that I was grateful for about the recipient. In one person, I noted their great sense of humor, in another, humility, in another, their unapologetic approach to life.
There was a scary side to writing these letters too. By writing a letter and actually sending it to the addressee, I felt vulnerable. I was putting myself out there. The children’s author Madeleine L’Engle noted, “When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability.… To be alive is to be vulnerable.” In writing these letters, I was opening up doors that I tended to hold tightly closed before. I made deliberate room for growth.
In an increasingly electronic world, the very physicality of a handwritten letter played a role. Paper is tangible. You can feel it, touch it, see it. I can run my fingers over the words on paper and know that they are truly there. Writing down my thoughts and communicating with others in this way brought a permanence to my feelings, fears, gratitude, and connection.
I don’t know what came of every letter. I heard back from some people while others disappeared silently into history. No matter the outcome, I found myself more connected to each individual that I had written to.
I still have letters that were written decades ago by parents and grandparents. These are artifacts that allow a look into the authors’ lives and hearts. They may not have realized at the time that the letter would be saved for decades, or passed down from one generation to the next.
Letters have become a way to hold onto the people and the impact they have in my life. The potential of that permanence and growth is powerful.
I hope that my letter writing days have only just begun. I have a running list of people who I would still like to write to. When I get off course in life again, I intend to use this powerful tool to bring focus back to the direction I want my life to take, and hopefully connect with a few other people along the way. There’s nothing quite like knowing that someone is thinking about you.