Deliver Happiness in a Note: Lifestyle Practice

This Week, We’re Writing a Happiness Note

Your Lifestyle Practice is to write and send via “snail mail” a personal handwritten note to someone in your life.

• Every day, you will write a personal, handwritten note of support, acknowledgement, gratitude, thank you, birthday, or love to a friend, family member, colleague, client, co-worker, teacher, or anyone else you know personally.
• This practice ALSO requires you to take the time to address, stamp and deliver the note in person or drop it into the mail

In today’s fast pace world of email, texts, Tweets, Facebook, Snapchats and other forms of electronic communication where conversation happens in short blasts of abbreviated text, art of handwritten letter writing may seem totally outdated. But there is nothing in any other electronic form of communication that compares to sitting down and writing a handwritten note. And while the information that is exchanged in a text or email can be both important and beneficial, it is incapable of communicating the heart-felt emotional energy that is contained in the ink on the paper.

I remember reading on the Art of Manliness blog that sending a letter is the next best thing to showing up personally at someone’s door. I couldn’t agree more. The time, effort and thought that goes into putting pen to paper somehow gets transferred into the letter itself, making the correspondence that much more meaningful. Surprisingly, the benefactor of the written word is often the writer himself. It’s as if simply taking the time to communicate that way opens up a direct channel to the heart and soul, and regardless of the recipient or response, the act of writing to another, out of generosity and goodness, like a boomerang, sends the message right back into the writer.

While convenience often trumps connection in today’s world, this week’s Lifestyle Practice represents an opportunity for you to re-connect with both yourself, and the people that are important to you in your life via an oft forgotten art that allows you to practice putting all of you into your communication with thought, feeling, time, effort, and ink on the page.