Dear Fellow Camels,
Does anyone dislike getting mail? In my four years at Conn, I’ve yet to hear anyone complain about an overabundance of letters or parcels. I feel like there is something universally heartwarming about seeing the sliver of an envelope resting diagonally against the walls of your campus box, something uplifting about reading the words that someone carefully choose specifically for you. Though, I think the best verbal articulation of this emotion is expressed by R. Kelly in his lyrical masterpiece, “Love Letter”: “sunny days, smiling face/spirit filled, heaven praise.”
But letter writing is a dying art. Despite the fact that most people enjoy receiving mail, less and less is being sent. Even just in the past decade, total mail volume has decreased from 206 billion to 158 billion . But I can’t say it doesn’t make sense. Social media and texting now dominates the realm of communication, allowing people to transfer information immediately, keeping in stride with their fast-paced lives.
Nowhere is this truer than on a college campus. Maybe it’s just me, but often I feel like everything is rushed. Students Hurry to class, to a meetings, to finish Moodle posts. I think it’s rubbing off on our communication skills. Important statements are reduced, and serious statements stripped to the bone as we dash off to the next thing. LOL. ILY. TTYL. I myself am guilty of this. “Thx 4 the support,” I wrote to a friend the other day. But I believe a balance can be struck. As much as I enjoy a well-posted Buzzfeed article, .gifs, memes, texts, tweets, and all other means of rapid communication cannot express the complexity and depth of how we feel.
So, this brings us back to letter writing. This isn’t about saving the postal service (I’ll save that argument for a different time and place), it’s about saving a little part of ourselves, and immortalizing it on paper. That sounds histrionic, but what I mean is that so much of letter writing is about preservation–preserving our language, our emotions, our relationships. I know that whatever you put on the Internet remains infinitely in cyberspace (or however all that stuff works), but I think in many ways letters have an even more important type of permanency.
As much as I love Facebook, you can’t carry around a post and wait to open it. You can’t touch it. You can’t see the person’s handwriting. You can’t smile at the tiny hand-drawn stamp in the corner. And more importantly, as a writer, you probably aren’t going to take a significant portion out of your day to carefully construct the digital post. I see Facebook, and other social media avenues, as fitting neatly within our hectic lives, allowing us to communicate while rushing off to our next engagement.
But when living life at this pace, it’s important to stop and look around once in a while, though looking around doesn’t necessarily need to be outwardly focused. Letter writing provides a rare time for introspection, amidst papers and labs and games and clubs, a time to pause and reflect–to choose words (and spell them with all necessary vowels) that you think will be meaningful to the recipient, to fill a page with your own thoughts and concerns. And to ask questions, to truly care about the response, to hope for a letter in return.
Letter writing is a thoughtful endeavor, in every sense of the word. And this is why I encourage all to consider obtaining a Conn Coll Pen Pal (bonus: campus mail is free). It’s thoughtful in the considerate sense (I think one of the best ways to make someone’s day a little brighter is to send them a kind letter) but also thoughtful in the contemplative sense. Letter writing is in many ways like writing in a journal, slowing down the pace of the day to sit down and wander through a mire of thoughts. But a letter is entrusted to another, and the words stay not only on the page, but also with the recipient.
Sincerely,
Sarah Huckins
