Write for Your Life

everyone has a voice.

In the twenty-first century I do not send a letter because I want to tell you something. I do it because I want to give you something, something personal and long-lasting. There’s a reason why we always envision a cache of letters tied up with a ribbon. It’s because they are a gift.

She was finding solace in writing her life, her thoughts and feelings, day after day. Words to live by.

writing is part of a chain. We spin words, for ourselves, a few others, or even the world, out of the past—not just our own, but those of the writers we have read and absorbed.

Writing is undoubtedly interaction with another human being, even if that human being is only yourself.

I feel less alone when I write as well. The process models a kind of empathy,

there is a promise implicit in those notes, the promise of something better, perhaps even really good.

Where are the letters those of us going through a crisis today will write that our own children will find in a cedar chest? Is the computer the cedar chest of the future, and how precisely will our descendants be able to pore over the contents?

Does anyone write texts or emails as substantial or as telling as what we find in the letters of the past? Isn’t the very nature of e-communication to be cursory in a way that will beggar the biographer going forward?