You live in, let's say, Finland. I am either too busy or too lazy to write you a letter, snail mail is becoming illogical. I can't visit you, after all, I'm in college, I'm trying to pay for food and don't have enough left over for sentimental cross-continent trips.
However, I feel the need to show you that I'm thinking of you, no matter what my motives are for doing so. I know the solution! Facebook wall post!
What a sad era we are inhabiting. Of course the people who invented cars had such big dreams. "If we can get to town faster, we'll have more time to be at home with our families, just enjoying life." they reasoned. What they didn't anticipate is the concept that if you can get to town in twenty minutes, where it used to take two hours, you'll stop appreciating the time you've saved by about the second trip. If the car doesn't have gas, or if it breaks down, the individual no longer sees a two hour trip as a normal amount of time anymore. They just complain about all the inconveniences of the lost time. How quickly we forget. Soon, they're cramming three trips around town into the time that it used to take for one. No one has gained any more precious time, they've just come to expect a higher performance.
Of course, I can't scorn the busy lifestyle expectations into which society has evolved. I live one myself. But I still can pull out a letter from a childhood pen pall with a level of sentiment.
You know how a little old lady makes scornful remarks about the level of texting we do on our "newfangled" iPhone? We look at her, and say the kind equivalent of, "You stupid old woman, you are living in the past. Can't you see that technology is awesome, and you are basically not even slightly cool?"
My gentle sentimental mourning over that precious piece of snail mail the other day made me wonder, maybe one of the reasons that elderly people cling to those old-fashioned routines and devices of past is because there is something truly beautiful about them. Something that is being swept aside by the storm of today. Something wonderful, like opening the mailbox to find a hand-colored envelope covered in stickers, holding it in your hands, and feeling like just for a moment, the two of you are connected. Imagining that your fingertips are brushing against each other on either side of that envelope...
Of course there's room for things to go forward, they have to, just like time must go forward, and I'm still going to make my grandpa shake his head by how quickly I can "hit those little buttons" on my cell phone. But maybe it just means that tomorrow, when I feel like telling someone that I'm thinking of them, i'll pick up a pen and paper, just because we shouldn't let beautiful things die.
