I've been using Twitter to find new penpals. Well, not quite, but I did ask who would like a pretty card in the mail, and quite a lot of people took me up on it, avowing their love of letterbox surprises and pretty things in general.
It tickles me that I'm using the fastest communication to support the slowest; I check my email and twitter several times a day (oh, the vagaries of an iphone) but nothing is quite the same as pulling a personally addressed envelope from the mail. It's grounding in a way that all this electronic communication is so much fairyfloss. Hit the delete button and it's gone, might never have existed. This envelope in my hands? Just to walk to the bin requires my active engagement, participation with measurable action.
Writing, like so many other things, is a luxury. Like slow food, like handmade gifts, like learning a new skill and practising it (not just going to a six week course and then forgetting the whole shebang) until it becomes familiar. How terribly ironic that in a world full of devices to make life easier and faster we have lost the time to go slow.
I'm struggling a little with the parameters of time while living by myself (although the pug's constant harassment for food means I can never fall too far off balance. I go to sleep too late, wake up untethered and not knowing whether I really have slept at all. I suspect I may be nocturnal and merely participating in this "let's all be awake during daylight" merely out of habit.
What do you do to ground yourself?
2 months ago