Writing Letters to Be a Better Person
There can be great satisfaction from ritual.
One of the finest rituals is writing correspondence. Putting pen to paper; considering your salutation, your content and your closing; dating your letter or card; noting where in the world you are writing from; correctly addressing your envelope; placing the right postage on the envelope, and; depositing the envelope into a post box.
Each stage of this ritual has its own nuance, considerations and choices. A kind of emotional and intellectual texture to run my mind across.
What pen shall I write with? The blue fountain or a black fine-point texta?
What level of formality and regard is appropriate? ‘Yours truly’ or ‘respectfully’ or ‘with love’? (And, here’s a fun discussion of which to use from the extremely successful Ukrainian app company, Grammerly: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/how-to-end-a-letter/)
Do I place the date and place at the top or under my signature block?
Return address on front (as in the USA) or on back of envelope (as in Australia)?
What interesting stamp can I get from Australia Post, especially for my overseas correspondence? Kangaroos, koalas, and kookaburras — all clichés — still go down very well, I find.
For me, it’s joyfully engaging stuff. I notice when little changes appear in the ritual. For example, Australia Post recently phased out the blue Air Mail stickers for envelopes; I now have a remaining stash — given to me by a simpatico counter guy — that I selectively enjoy using.
So, yes, writing letters is “about me” in many ways. It’s something I enjoy, and have done so since the pre-digital era. While I have been poor at keeping old letters, as I never really imagined myself as having a long life to review, I retain their memory. Sending and receiving letters from the old sandstone GPO on Martin Place in the late 80s when they were basically my only tie between Australia and the United States. Carefully crafting romantic offerings to young women (as a young man of course). Writing back-and-forth paragraphs of fiction with an old friend — whose letters from sea as a US Navy seaman, reminiscent of Ismael in Moby Dick, remain among the best I have ever received.
For me, every received letter has in at least some small way been a new start, a new view, and a new heartbeat.
I guess it’s why I send them too. That’s especially ‘thank you notes’ in a world I sense has become too fast for that old fashioned practice. I hope that, for the price of some paper, a pen and the postage, I can bring something positive to someone else’s life. Knowledge that they are appreciated. Knowledge that they are remembered. Knowledge that they are cared for — even across the improbably fast years and impossibly long distances.
It’s especially important for me to try because I am an impatient man. It’s quite possible that I am perhaps even touched by ADHD – and have had it from well before we had the initials for those like me who are prone to impulsiveness and haste. Unlike tapping out emails or texts or any other part of the digital deluge, the writing of a letter or note sees me slow down my own brain and my own self-obsessions to sufficiently give a shit about others. It helps me connect when my hardwiring – and years of habit – is toward distraction and avoidance. Writing letters helps me a bit more human and humane.
Or, as Lewis Carroll said: “The proper definition of ‘man’ is ‘an animal who writes letters.’”
So, today, as I go outside on a lockdown exemption to deposit four ‘thank you notes’ in my cheerful red Australia Post box, I’m grateful for letters. And I’m very grateful to Sir Rowland Hill (1795 to 1879) to whom I would write if one could do so across the ages and into the ether.
Sir Rowland holds a special place in my heart and in the practice of my ritual. For he invented the postage stamp and laid the foundations of the modern postal system. (Before Sir Rowland, recipients paid for their letters based on the number of sheets of paper or weight of the parcel etc.)
Sir Rowland well and truly made his mark. That my little correspondence can make a little one too.
