Dear Sunday: letters
where your legacy and the weather coexist on the page
“The great benefit of slowing down is reclaiming the time and tranquility to make meaningful connections—with people, with culture, with work, with nature, with our own bodies and minds” Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed
To thrive, to find the source of our beauty, our speed-addicted culture needs more beautiful letters. The pause of letter-writing for both the writer and the recipient brings a connection unmatched by other forms of modern, long-distance communication. At the heart of all social media, text, and email is a desire to connect.
A letter is the most generous gift we can give.
I began professionally researching slow, connected living via letter-writing, by nature of my own love of letters. In my early twenties, I noticed one of the most therapeutic ways the teenagers would connect to their friends and family and ultimately, themselves, while at a clinical residential or wilderness therapy program, was through letter-writing. I began to study the therapeutic effects of letter writing.
I had the pleasure of studying teens who did not grow up with smartphones. Years later, I also had an interesting experience working with teenagers who were juxtaposing smartphones with their aboriginal cultures in Alaska. One student was combining modern hip hop with the native language from her arctic Alaskan village! And later still, the honor of working with teenagers who were the first babies on the planet whose parents had smartphones documenting their every experience through the screen. Regardless of their relationship to smartphones, all of my students found letters to comfort their time without access to any other form of long-distance communication, addressing self-care, generating connection, and slowing down.
Much of my work with adolescents helped cultivate wholeness and I relied on expressive and affectionate writing as a backbone of the hands-on therapeutic aspect of my programming. Out in the wilds of our modern world, teens today have smartphones, which are considered an addictive substance, in their hands every day. Children and adolescents need our model more than ever before. The art of slowing down in today’s culture takes a creative and active awareness. But the impacts on our physical and mental health are invaluable.
ALL DAY is a reader-supported publication with essays, letters, and thought projects. Your presence here forms a connection that weaves our stories together.
I invite you to become a paid subscriber to support this publication. Check out what some of the ALL DAY readers have to say. Dear Sunday is for all subscribers, and the prompts and extra essays will be for paid subscribers! Love you!
According to a study in Human Communication Research, affectionate writing has been linked to reducing stress and lowering cholesterol. Letter-writing also enhances relationships and increases general wellness. “Writing is therapeutic because at the core of writing is self-expression,” says Lauren Garvey, MS, CRC, NCC, a counselor and facilitator at Cancer Wellness at Piedmont.
Years ago, I caught wind of an important study on body confidence in women via self-compassion writing exercises and letters to the self. I read in an article in Newsweek that “Renee Engeln, a professor of instruction in psychology at Weinberg and an author of the study, told Newsweek that ‘This study shows us that a quick, free and enjoyable intervention can boost body satisfaction and positive mood among women who might be struggling with body image. Taking some time to reframe thoughts about your body in self-compassionate terms can be powerful.’”
Since 2017, I’ve taught a class called Write a Beautiful Letter. This class is a culmination of all the things I’ve studied over the years about slow, connected living, and years ago I decided to include Write a Beautiful Love Letter. Imagining couples signing up, I’d written the outline based on my husband’s and my shared devotion to love letters and our marriage (we have always written each other letters, and still, to this day, write many letters to one another). When I learned that the class would include almost entirely women, both single and in a relationship, I re-wrote the structure of the class and taught self-compassion, a sort of Art of the Poetic Woman. These women wrote such creative letters to their selves, letters to manifest a partner, letters to manifest more compassion in their relationship to the way they speak about themselves.
That’s one of the things I love about letters—how they allow our common creativity to flow. Brilliantly, there is less creative pressure when writing a letter, so as a writer, I’ve often found my voice through writing letters. I have a poet colleague (our relationship began with letter-writing when I asked to be pen pals), who has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. She wrote an article for the Poetry Foundation about what it’s like to write poetry with OCD attempting to stop her at every turn of the page, and how letter-writing has been the cheat code to write poetry. “My brain, anxious as it is, understands that a letter and a poem are entirely different beasts. If starting a poem is like charging at a lion, then starting a letter is like petting a cat.” Writing letters and sending mail is an authentic way to access your creativity. We write letters to express ourselves, to discover ourselves, to live—for a moment—within the space between ourselves and the recipient. Letters have an impressive ability to hold legacy within the same paragraph as the weather. Letters are unapologetically artistic and intuitive. They are authentic and can reveal as much about the sender and recipient as the subject matter itself.
With cursive being taken away from public school education, we need letters more than ever. With a culture addicted to fast, we need letters more than ever before. We need letters more than ever before. Write a beautiful letter today, a humble one, a postcard, even.
I want to leave you with an excerpt from Simon Garfield’s book, To the Letter:
“Letters have the power to grant us a larger life. They reveal motivation and deepen understanding. They are evidential. They change lives, and they rewire history. The world once used to run upon their transmission — the lubricant of human interaction and the freefall of ideas, the silent conduit of the worthy and the incidental, the time we were coming for dinner, the account of our marvelous day, the weightiest joys and sorrows of love. It must have seemed impossible that their worth would ever be taken for granted or swept aside. A world without letters would surely be a world without oxygen.”
Until soon,
Lindsey
PS, Do you want a pen pal? Post a comment or
hit reply to this email and write me a letter and we can see if we want to write letters in the mail, too! You know I love that. I’m also curious: how many of you are interested in me intuitively linking you to another reader of ALL DAY for a blind pen pal?
As always, I’m on the other side of a letter.
Thank you to those of you who are on this journey with me. I find such joy in connecting with you and I hope you’ll reply to this essay and say hi.