I have long fantasized a life of epistolary communion with those I love the most in this world. There is intimacy and vulnerability in the eager anticipation of sitting down on a Sunday morning by a window-side desk looking out into a day breaking, readying oneself to compose deep and unembellished thoughts, which one prepares in careful prose, clumsy or lyrical or divine, to be savoured by another, coffee in hand.
Suppose you live to 75, you’d have 657,000 hours to allocate in your lifetime, of which the first decade is lost to a gestation of sorts, and next a frantic haze in which we find our place in life, quite incapable of giving ourselves with intentions to another. Around a third of life is sleep and maintenance. Another third is devoted to activities for subsistence – be it work, learning to work, or other obligatory activities in which we engage primarily to collect calories. That leaves around 120,450 hours left… or about 14 years. Much of it will be lost to queues and idleness. At best, then, we have a little over a decade that is truly discretionary.
Time, therefore, is our most precious resource. It is life itself. There is no act of love, trust, and respect more earnest than offering someone our time.
Letters are just that, at once a symbol of another’s most profound commitment of ‘togetherness’ to you, and that very commitment itself, like ambers of slow, deliberate contemplation that preserves an outpouring of time, an interminable conversation always awaiting to be resumed.
It is easy for us to fall into an illusory feeling of togetherness. News and information are available at ones’ fingertip; Instagram stories and Facebook updates have rendered life’s happenstances a matter of broadcast; major life events are streamed in real time; but when the very fabrics of your life are unfolded before the passive eyes of a thousand followers, buried in a cacophony of their browser tabs, when private affairs are offered for public consumption, you leave very little room for another to truly know you. Any meaning is lost when diffused into a motley.
The Poet John O’Donohue warns that we are unpracticed in the art of belonging. A letter is redemption. It necessitates recipients, with whom you have automatically created a private universe in which the pages become ground and your ink becomes breath. Behind gravity you underlie wit, beneath the superficial you bolster with the profound, and into the frivolous you infuse life. Letters are painstaking labors, and perhaps we’re losing the ability, and even the willingness, to slow down for another.
But in a milieu of haste and impatience, slow thoughts matter.
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