Living my Life in One Hour
I’ve
been going through old piles and boxes of paper in recent days. Retirement has freed me to get some things
done that have been neglected for a long time.
Progress, however, has been slow, especially since I found many letters
from and to my grandparents and my parents and other family members. I also laughed and cried reading letters from
my children through the years. I wept
through the letters of encouragement sent from a friend who has shared my
difficult years. Mihai Eimnescu wrote, “You
take old letters from a crumpled heap and in one hour have lived your life
again.” So I have been living a part of
my life again.
In today’s world of texting and
short emails--one of my brothers insists that emails should be one short
paragraph on one subject only--I mourn the loss of letters, written by hand or
typed, pretty stationary or scraps of paper.
My brother insists that he has saved all his emails, but will he ever go
back and read them? My son insist that
he saves all of his texts, but the only illustration he could come up with of
going back to them was replaying old videos of his daughter on his phone. I replay some of those videos too, but those
do not have the effect of a letter.
Alice Steinbach said, “A letter is
always better than a phone call. People
write things in letters they would never say in person. They permit themselves to write down feelings
and observations using emotional syntax far more intimate and powerful than
speech will allow. Other letters simply
relate the small events that punctuate the passage of time: roses picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy
Sunday, a child crying himself to sleep.
Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of
happiness, move me more deeply than all the rest. A couple of lines or eight pages, a Middle
Eastern stamp or a suburban postmark. . . I hoard all these letters like
treasure.”
I feel the same. The letters from my mother entertained me
with the stories of my little sister’s antics.
I never lived at home with her, so these were snippets of her
personality I never would have known. My
grandmother in her letters loved me, bragged on me, encouraged me, stimulated
me spiritually, showed concern for my health, expressed interest in my friends (especially
if they were young men!), shared her activities, and even shared her dreams and
frustrations. All of these and more are
the story of my life.
Goethe, the German writer of many
years ago said that “Letters are among the most significant memorial a person
can leave behind them.” I have been
pondering the letters I have both sent and received in my lifetime. I have realized that these have been fewer
and fewer. So, one of the things I want
to do in this new stage of life is write letters—to my children, to my
grandchildren, to family members, to friends, to acquaintances. Perhaps God will even show me strangers I
need to write to.
What kind of written memorial will
you be leaving to those who will still be here when your life is done? Will there be evidence of your great love for
them? Will there be evidence of God’s
greater love for them? Where are your
letters?
~~Faith Himes Lamb
