Write Yo-self a Lettah
In a very old-fashioned turn of events, I have recently acquired a pen pal. Yes, we write each other actual letters on actual paper with actual pens, and hey! Hey STOP! Don’t you dare hurl The Big Issue across the room in irritation! No! I am not, I promise, about to condemn you for neglecting the lost art of correspondence. I am forever reading articles telling me what I’m doing wrong, often involving things that seem to impossibly misunderstand the contemporary life in the frenzied frantic middle of which I find myself.
No, but here is what I have learned from my new/old habit of letter-writing: we now live in a world that moves all the time. The letter does not.
Anything I think of to report to my penpal is immediately usurped by the passing of time. I wrote a sentence the other day, by the end of which, it was a lie.
Letter-writing reminds me, in a way that mindfulness has attempted to for years quite frankly, that none of these bits of news I’m reporting will last forever. Even if they’re huge events in my life, the next time I put to paper they will have been further advanced by the passing of time. My thinking will have changed, or someone else’s will. This too shall pass.
Public Service Announcement: this too shall pass.
Yesterday, I woke up and drove to a TV studio to be interviewed on one of those breakfast shows where the hosts joke around together and tell you the news and interview reporters in beanies from the sidelines of sporting matches. Being on TV is a very weird experience at the best of times, but this was extra strange because it was a live interview where the two hosts were behind a desk in one of those bright studios that looks like a spacecraft designed by a tellytubby and I… was in another State completely. I do mean geographically, but also, it could be argued, mentally, as well.
I was ushered into a dark cupboard, told to sit on a stool in front of a fake cityscape background, hooked up to a microphone and earpiece, and was then left in the room alone. By myself. No camera operators. No sound dudes. There was a screen with my face (gah!) and another with the tellytubby set (gah!) but I’d been told to look in a third direction. The hosts introduced me (gah!) and I heard my own voice in my earpiece when I answered. Should scientists ever require the formula for an instant panic attack, they could do worse than hooking someone up to recording equipment in a dark chamber with little to no instruction but full in the knowledge that their responses are being beamed live to the nation.
I did not have a panic attack, I am pleased to say, but I did experience several moments of what felt like observational remove. I could see the moment. ’This sure is a moment’, I seemed to be telling myself. ‘It would be a shame if you forgot what you were saying in this bit’, I helpfully observed. ‘Perhaps’, my thoughts continued, ‘you have forgotten what you were saying’. At this prospect, my brain did not allow me to access any thoughts except the thought that my brain contained precisely no thoughts.
This interview, I assured myself later in the car, will surely help future generations, featuring in the ‘at least you’ll never crash out this spectacularly live on air’ component of the course. Had I been blinking silently, stunned and confused, for several minutes? I hoped I would never find out.
Later though, they posted my interview online. I closed my eyes when I pressed play, then watched the disaster unfold.
Astonishingly though, that entire operatic catastrophe actually lasted for a nanosecond. It is a perfectly normal interview. I gasped.
So you see, sometimes the lesson is: this too shall pass - and much more quickly than you thought it would!
The present feels different when you’re in it. I’ve read a lot of famous people’s letters and they’re hardly ever as interesting as you want them to be. They’re full of things like ‘I’m out of warm socks’ and ‘did you get the photos printed?’
Our days fill up and stretch out and sometimes big things happen and sometimes little things happen and sometimes the little thing feels like a big thing, and only time will tell.