Summer Lessons: A Project in Connection

I'm considering starting a project.

I'm going to make myself a little kit. It will have envelopes, paper, pens, stamps... and every week, I'll write a letter to someone. Maybe it will be a friend, if I can get enough of them to send me their up-to-date contact info. Maybe it will be family. Maybe it will be a politician, or a celebrity, or someone I know of who's incarcerated. Maybe it will be someone I remember from long ago.

But I'll write a letter a week.

Connect with people in a personal, if archaic, way.

I hate when people knock on technology and decry our use of it as being too wired, too impersonal... Humans are social creatures, and much of our use of technology is simply extending that even further. I even read a great article which refers to the proprioception that arises from the use of social media.

But that being said, sometimes being a sprinkler gets tiring.

All that whirling, making sure every blade of grass gets watered. Sometimes you have to get out the spray bottle and give specific plants a little TLC. A lot of our relationships are like grass; make sure they get enough water and you don't really run a risk of them shriveling up and dying away. They may not thrive into towering trees or flowering shrubs; but it's grass, that's not what it's for. Not every relationship in your life can, or should, be monumental. Heck, the human brain is only cognitively capable of maintaining 150 true friendships.

But some plants you baby and pamper. You tend them carefully. Not because they're more important than the grass; but because they're the ones you want to see thrive.

I guess I just want to make a point of doing that in my life.

My family never was very good with plants.