A month of letter-writing: A retrospective

I've been writing letters for a month now, somewhat irregularly -- it's the most irregular of my planned checklist activities -- but frequently enough that I've sent it to multiple dozens friends, acquaintances and loved ones. Sometimes I'll be lazy like right now and delay the actual posting of the letters --  have seven letters that need posting, but once they get posted, they make their way to their recipients eventually. I've begun receiving the responses of the first round now.

A few weeks back I wondered, why was I doing this, so much effort and cost, when I could just as easily (actually much much easily) be texting them, talking to them, even seeing their faces while saving myself the time and energy. And here's the answer to that: there's a value in the asynchronous nature of letter-writing, the fact that it's not somewhere waiting for you to check out, that the sender doesn't even know you've received it, and that they're in no way required or expected to respond to it. The friction involved in writing the letters itself is important, it clears the mind on what's important and what's not, what can fit within those hundred words, and how you really don't need to communicate much -- communication can actually be summarized to couple of hundreds of words over a month if you really trimmed it down. And finally, it doesn't feel like I'm staying in touch with people just for the sake of doing it, but there's actually value in doing it.

So, review: I"m loving it. Really. I hope I can keep doing it while I'm traveling, that honestly seems quite doubtful but I wish. It would be such a great experience for all my friends to receive postcards from Nepal in this day and age. And that's what's it's all about I think. The effort it takes to produce these pieces of communication, not only do they really make you think about the persons you're sending to, but the receivers realize that you do value them and their bond, for not everyone takes 15 minutes and a letter, plus the postage and the addressing, to send them 'hey what's up' messages. One more thing, the more I write letters the better I seem to be getting at it, and the more clear my thought process is getting on what I want to talk to them about. It's almost like being with them right there! Which is the opposite of what you'd expect.

Writing of the letters is down to 10 minutes, the arms and wrists hurt, but it's totally doable. Not sure if it's going to go down any more than that, but if I can do that in 7/8 minutes and can get two letters out in a day in 15-ish minute commitment daily, that would be incredible. That would mean I could reach out to 40-ish people every month, which is quite a bit more than the number of people I reach out to on text or on various social media apps. I'm really looking forward to it! $20 a month to be able to handwrite, care for your friends, and actually have them know you care about them is a very small price to pay. And the feeling cannot be automated away.