I saw a post the other day about the excitement they felt at seeing someone's handwriting for the first time.
And it made me think about how mind blowing it is that we don't know what our loved ones handwriting looks like, because once upon a time, we saw each other's handwriting all the time:
- Passing notes in class
- Receiving little reminders from our parents
- Notes from our teachers, in our school planners
- Birthday cards covered in well wishes and private jokes
But now, so much of our communication happens instantly.
- I message my 78-year-old Mum on Messenger or WhatsApp.
- I keep up with my cousins through social media.
- I chat to my old university friend who lives hundreds of miles away, through a screen.
It is like we have forgotten how to write to the people we love, and I feel a considerable sadness about that.
Every so often, I send my 7-year-old niece a handwritten letter.
It might just look like a small piece of paper with words on it, but those words are mine, and they are just for her. She knows what my handwriting look like, and she knows that I have taken the time to send something special to her.
I hope that one day she will look back through a collection of letters and remember that I took the time to sit down and write to her, and I hope that she understands the gravity of that, in an age when we just don't write letters anymore.
But, maybe handwriting doesn't need to be something that we discover for the first time. Maybe it's something we start to take for granted, because we see it so often.
Maybe it is time we brought letter writing back.
You can now buy letter writing tools and stationery from our new Paper Shop.