Love in a Digital Age

It seems that our lives are about hurrying here and there and everywhere. We have a whole culture around speed and instant gratification from fast food to ATMs to twitter and it's 140 characters of info. All this fast, frantic energy has also brought us more stress, depression and exhaustion. "Work hard, play harder", I heard someone say a while ago. Unfortunately, it has left many of us wanting a different way...a slower way for our journey through life.

This speed shows up in how we relate to each other and how we communicate our love for one another. A text here, an email there, everything is about efficiency without a lot of time spent of truly slowing down and taking in an experience with another soul. We have become a culture of wanting more and giving less. I know that these are generalizations AND I am surely that there is a lot of truth of this in your life. I know that is the case in my life. Whatever happened to taking the time to sit down and write a letter on real paper with a pen or pencil? With allowing yourself to feel the pen flow across the page as you tell your story to someone you care about. Wouldn’t you love to get a letter from a relative or friend you haven’t heard from in a while? I bet you would open it right away simply because of your interest that someone actually took time to write to you.

I remember back in 2003 during my immigration to Canada from our home in Hamburg, Germany that I our lawyer, who was being very thorough, asked my partner and I to write each other a love letter. It would be used to demonstrate that we weren’t just two guys trying to get around the system. Though I found the reason cynical, I found the process amazing. I was being asked to show my love to this amazing man I was moving to Canada with in written form. I took out a piece of paper and wrote a heartfelt letter to my now husband, Henrik. What a lovely task to do and it really help to confirm that I wanted to be with him and make this journey together. It ended up being a gift to both of us. I still have this letter and it still resonates to this day.

In this era of speed, wouldn't it be nice to receive a handwritten letter in the mail instead of just bills or commercial flyers? Let's bring back the love letter! There are definitely people in your life that could use a little more love, compassion with a written expression of that in their mailbox. It doesn’t have to be a long letter, just something from the heart. Check out how one young woman took this a step further by sending love letters to people she didn’t know. People suffering from depression, loneliness and severe illness. There are so many ways to take this and help bring our world a little closer together. Sadly, we can’t truly express ourselves in 140 characters like we can in a letter that is handwritten. With that, I am going to write a letter to someone I haven’t connected with in a while. I guarantee it will shock them in a good way