Handwritten

A person who can write a long letter with ease cannot write ill. ~Jane Austen

The art of the handwritten letter is in danger of extinction.

With the advances of technology moving forward the way they have been, the very existence of pen and paper is slowly fading into oblivion.

Text messages. Cell phones. Facebook. Computers.

What need do we have for paper and pencil? For stamps and envelopes? Journals? Notebooks?

It's disappearing.

Computers contract viruses and crash; cell phone towers get knocked out in bad weather. When a file is deleted or erased, it's gone forever.

In a way, we're loosing a legacy. There's no sentimental delight in finding an old hard drive.

We're surrendering so much; it's tragic.

We're giving up that excitement of opening up an old jewelry box and finding a forgotten love note...a "thinking-of-you" note from Mom the day we started High School... a scrap of pencil-decorated paper slipped into a lint-filled pocked by a friend.

There's a fine art to be found in picking up a pen and letting all your thoughts flow out in ink onto a blank paper canvas. There's no spell-checker, no automatic grammatical correcter, and no backspace key.

It's 100% genuine.

You can't hide behind the impersonality of the internet or the disconnect of a text message.

It's a form of reality. It's a way of letting go of our pent-up emotions and letting them just pour out in a way that a keyboard just can't convey.

It seems almost criminal to let go of something so wonderful, so old-fashioned and so fresh at the same time.

Maybe it's just the romantic artist in me, but I can't imagine living in a world where the delight of handwriting is forgotten.

So write a letter...fall into a flashback...

...don't let the ink dry.