Goodbye, Farewell, Adieu
Friends new and old, as we bid farewell to 2022, I leave you with this hope:
May 2023 bring you great fortune and personal growth, new opportunities to find and share your strengths, space to find peace, people who champion you and lift you up, and all the usual "health and happiness" stuff.
And may your coffee (or tea) always be hot and bottomless.
Holidays are hard at the best of times for many. The lists, the rituals and traditions, and the expectations (and the pressure to meet those expectations) often feel suffocating and impossible. The push to “make it happen, make it joyous” has been my undoing more than once. The (possibly unfair) feelings of being forgotten or an afterthought lie in the wake of holiday adrenaline.
December is a lot.
December feels endless.
Throughout the pandemic, I realized I missed human connection — interesting for me, as I’m largely an introvert who prefers social interaction in small bursts, and typically find I need a few days to recover from highly social situations. (And yet I work in retail, go figure!) As quiet week followed quiet week, I craved people in a way I don’t think I ever have in my entire life. I rediscovered my love of mailing letters and cards and whenever things felt a bit much or one of my friends posted something on a social platform that moved me, I would drop a note or card in the mail.
The idea of making a physical, tangible, connection was sustaining. The idea that someone had something of me that they could hold in their hands was fulfilling. It was real. It was solid. So when Christmas loomed and I began to feel pressure building, I put out a call for addresses. I reached out to family members, friends from childhood, friends I’ve only ever known online and people in my life now, and built up my address book.
Every day for a few weeks, I mailed a handful of cards. With no expectation of anything in return, out they flew, dropped in the big red box across from my work or the post office a short walk from my home — little winged messengers sending my sincerest good wishes to people who have touched my life this year. Some Folks even mailed cards back in return.
In an era of online hyper-connection, something as simple as a card seems quaint and beautiful.
Taking the time to put pen to paper, write a note or sign your name, stick a stamp on an addressed card, and drop it into a mailbox is a meditation on building and maintaining connections. Every time I signed my name, I inscribed my affection and appreciation to the recipient — the address written and the stamp stuck and the card dropped in the box and the ritual completed, like an incantation cast of good wishes and a blessed new year for the person who would open it on the other end.
With a healthy, ever-growing address book, I will continue to send out cards and notes through the year. It brings me great joy to stick a stamp on an envelope. It brings me contentment to build physical connections, no matter how small, to all the wonderful and fascinating and beautiful people I know who inhabit my sphere. Knowing that an unexpected note or card has landed in someone’s mailbox at just the right time to lift spirits has made me so very happy.