By Keith C. Milne
For many people these days, email seems about as ho-hum and mundane as it gets. This holds especially true for younger people who definitely favor the immediacy of texting, by far, over having to deal with cumbersome email which always seems to come with the unwanted extra luggage of spam, spyware, phishing attempts and the like. Who wants to deal with that anymore? I sure don’t, and I can see how some can argue heavily in favor of texting, but texting cannot hold a candle to email when it comes to allowing the sender or the reader the time to convey anything meaningful in a thoughtful, respectful, and meaningful way simply because the setting for using texting in the first place calls for brevity in messaging, and immediacy in answering, precluding depth of content by its very nature.
And, texting was never meant to be about meaningful. In fact meaningful things sent in a text are mostly MEAN. Texting is all about conveying simple, quick bits and bites of data like “I’m almost there” or “meet me at 3 at the diner” and the like, not how getting sexually excited for the first time when you were fourteen made you feel.
I email daily, and I love it for many reasons. Mainly, I love the clarity of thought that seems to arise out of the process of putting thoughts to writing, and, quite often, the quirky and creative side detours that come out of that journey, and then sharing them.
Over time, all those people you have shared snippets of yourself with, and them with you, result in both of you having that one momentary piece of each other–your different lines of reasoning or opinions or feelings about any one of infinite possible topics–but particular thoughts and corresponding words in real time, preserved for as long as someone keeps the file or email. Similar to a photograph that captures someones image in real time, in an instant, for as long as the photo can be preserved. I think that is one of the coolest things!
Reading what someone else has written in a personal correspondence can be very different from one communication to the next. How the communication comes across is definitely a function of where the author who wrote it felt, both physically and emotionally, but just as importantly, where they were geographically, and culturally.
Equally important is what the reader brings with them and the feelings they are experiencing involving the exact same criteria when reading such personal rantings that are often about troubled times and personal struggles. All the fears, wants, lusts, and rages over things that we mostly cannot and/or never will be able to control can come out over time, as can just how frustrating it is to have to learn these basic, yet core, and very heartfelt lessons about what we really can and cannot do in life, and our journey to the fact that all we really have control over in life are ourselves.
Writing to someone via email is writing a letter, but with the big advantage of not having to wait the 3 to 5 days for the mail system to (hopefully) get it to the intended recipient and hopefully not having to wait weeks to receive a reply.
I am old enough to remember the earliest days of email. Back then, in the early 1990’s, people did not take such new, and enormously convenient technology for granted! It was that simple. Email was amazing! Once I got an Internet Service Provider, a computer, and an external 9600 baud modem, suddenly I was able to write to family in California while living in Virginia, and get answers the same day instead of waiting weeks! It was fantastic! Yes it was slow or even a snails pace compared to today’s speeds, but it it didn’t need to be fast at all when it was only sending the bits and bites needed for black and white text as email! Biggest, longest emails in the world (without attachments) are mere kilobytes, not anything huge at all. And it was incredible!
I loved being able to write to people INSTANTLY for the first time ever! What was the most frustrating thing back then, next to the occasional dropped connection from the modem, was that it took so long for people to get computers and do the same thing. In other words, there were far fewer people on the internet and most of the email were between people in classes together at colleges and universities, and their professors and the scientific community as well.
However, once the personal computer really began to hit the consumer market hard, especially with PC’s coming out loaded with the new Microsoft Windows 3 Operating System. Those early PC’s sold in droves and email caught on immediately for virtually EVERYONE who ended up ultimately getting a computer and an internet account and connecting to the internet. It quickly became the default or standard way to communicate for anyone who had the means and know how-both of which became hot assets and skill sets to have and, oddly enough at least for awhile during that time, a fast track to higher status in social circles as well.
My wife and I met via email in the 1990’s. I responded to a News Group post of hers (do they even have those anymore?) about some issues she was having that I thought I could help her with and we became email friends. We continued writing to each other several times per week initially, and then almost everyday of the week until after over 490 emails and almost 10 months of writing them back and forth to each other we met for the first time. She lived in Massachusetts and I lived in Virginia, but because of all of those prior emails in which we discussed almost everything imaginable, we already knew an incredible amount of information about each other when we met for the very first time, and we both felt as if we had known each other for years already 🙂
In a similar fashion, but using “snail” mail, or good ‘ole USPS, while doing a semester project in my Psychology Of Aging class at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, I corresponded with my paternal Grandmother, exchanging nearly 50 letters to each other in a back and forth question and answer for my project which was her life history through the lens of “Psychology Of Aging”, and needed to include all the the concepts and terms learned during that semester, somehow utilized in the process of telling my Grandmother’s life history from her youth all the way through to her current age which, at the time, she was in her 8th decade.
For these and other reasons, I continue to enjoy email and use email, even in the age of texting and social media obsession. It is often important to take time to think before responding, less you say something you regret in anger, another pitfall if texting.
Here is something fun or therapeutic I’m willing to bet very few have ever been asked to try: try sending yourself an email. That’s right, SEND YOURSELF AN EMAIL! Make it one that you would love to get from someone else! Pretend. It’s fun! Try writing about all that you’ve been doing or all that you haven’t been doing and miss doing. Write about how you feel about what’s been happening politically, or about how you feel about how Covid-19 has affected your life. Write about your shitty next door neighbors latest antics, or how much you hate your boss or your job. Make it your own and make it as personal as you can get!! It will help you sort out your feelings, and it will help you put what is and isn’t important in your life into proper perspective. It will help you clarify what you do and don’t like or dislike, want to do or do not want to do.
Fantasize. Imagine how you want to be. Imagine your life how you want it to be. Soak in the image. Sit down in your dream, slowly, in a bright light, feeling very relaxed, and calm, and at peace inside, as you realize that all is well and is exactly how it should be at this point in your life. Feel the peace in that knowledge and know that as you move forward through your life, all of what you imagine for yourself and hold in your minds eye will eventually manifest into your reality.
Wasn’t that nice? Write an email that includes all of those elements to yourself. Re-read these as needed to help you when you feel weak or angry or victimized.
You can always use email to write to yourself or to write anything you want and have it saved for viewing later by ourselves and others who have been recipients, or who might become recipients of our writing, that reflected who we were at the various times in our lives all of these letters were written.
I hope you will rediscover good old email. It’s a fantastic tool for getting into the habit of writing, and writing is getting into the habit of getting in touch with your true self.
Just saying . . .