Spin-off Mail

The most touching spin-off happened from the Need Less, Give More experiment. My friend, Teresa revealed on my birthday that she is doing an experiment of her own. She decided to send one card or letter of encouragement and love to someone every week until my next birthday. Not an email, not a phone call, but a real life, snail-mail card.

I love her idea and I love the response she is already getting. In fact, she said having the goal to send one letter a week has made her think of others she would like to send and she has ended up sending more than one each week since my birthday. She wrote this in an email: "Oh, interesting thing, Wendy. Instead of just writing one person I find myself sending several…those things I had meant to do,…. Sympathy, wedding anniversary, birthday…just had not done them yet. Maybe the “fruit” of this experiment is to motivate me to do the “I should." Hmmmm."

There is just something so warm and exciting about receiving a real letter in the mail. I've received a couple from Teresa myself and I always get a thrill when I see the hand-addressed envelope. It's really the only thing that makes me keep getting the mail at all. I'm not a big fan of mail usually. I would give anything to be able to stop the junk mail and intercept the unwanted solicitations before they end up in my mailbox. I try to pick off the mail slowly piece by piece by calling the junk-mail senders and asking them to take me off their list, but it's a laborious process and doesn't seem to net good results. I still get a lot of junk mail I don't want. Someday I hope they come up with a do-not-send list like the do-not-call list for telephone solicitations.

But now I'm getting off the point. My point is this: personal letters = good. Junk mail = bad. Teresa and her year-long experiment = lovely.