​Having a near death experience changes you. If you reach a certain age, you’ve probably had something occur in your life that brought you closer to your maker, causing you to think differently in terms of how you approach living.

While IMO I didn’t have a near death experience the past four weeks, I did have something bad enough occur to my body that others in my family felt I might not stay around if I didn’t get things taken care of medically. So, I did. Two visits to urgent care. One followup visit to a surgeon

Without going into too much detail, I had a spider bite that inflated and caused significant pain. After three days, I visited urgent care and got dosed with an antibiotic and steroid. A week later, the doctor cut the inflammation open, drained it and put me on a more targeted antibiotic. One week after that, I went to a surgeon who opened me up again and further drained liquid by swabbing out the bacterial contamination. I’m healing, down to a scab.

I see things differently today than I did four weeks ago. More appreciative of the people in my sphere, thankful I’ve been given time to do more good in the world (hopefully my version of “good” makes sense to others). I’m taking things a bit slower. Listening more. Savoring my food taste by taste. Trying some new experiences.

In the past, I’ve had more near death experiences, and similar reactions have occurred and shaped my views on how to live and serve. And marvel at medical science. Without it, I likely would have died at age 14, when I had an appendicitis attack. Even back then, I remember thinking that if I had been born 50 years earlier, that 14 would have likely been my last birthday. Heavy thoughts for a burgeoning adolescent.

Living in the Dallas Fort-Worth metro area for 12 years, I remember driving home after work one day. I was at a stop light. It turned green. I waited to move. I don’t know why. A semi was stopped coming from my left, but the lizard in the back of my brain said not to go into the intersection yet. Sure enough, a car hidden behind the semi blasted from behind it through their red light, easily going 45-50 mph. It would have nailed my driver side at full blast if I’d accelerated like normal. Toast.

In the ensuing years, I’ve thought of the incident many times. I’m blessed I wasn’t hit, maimed or killed. 

Several years later, while being treated for peripheral neuropathy in my feet through an IV drip, I received contaminated medicine. I did not know that at the time.

I came home, and wracking seizures hit me, and I couldn’t get warm in the 103-degree DFW heat, throwing on a winter jacket, hat and several comforters while shaking uncontrollably. I took four Advil, then another four every 5 hours or so, thinking I had a sudden bad case of the flu, walking around ghost-white and everyone asking me what was wrong. “Ah, got a bad case of the flu.”

Until I got a call two days later from the CDC, asking my name, confirming who I was and them telling me to get IMMEDIATELY to the local hospital because of two other people having the IV drip from the batch they used on me, one was dead and the other was on life support. I hit the hospital, they did all the tests, and miraculously, somehow, I was on the mend and my body had dominated the contamination. I went back for a followup a week later and the doctor just shook his head at my recovery. “You have the strongest immune system I’ve ever seen,” I remember him saying.

Ever thankful again, I moved on, this event shaping my more spontaneous, exploratory, curious way of moving through this world. Life can be brutal. Life can easily be taken from you with no warning. Stay vigilant. Seize the moment.

Days, weeks, months, years can turn bad, like with the spider bite putting me in a pain vice grip. If you are graced to come through these types of experiences, you contemplate what’s important, why you live the way you do and what’s really valuable. You ponder this more with age, and say to yourself when you see someone really struggling (physically, mentally, psychically, financially), “There I go but for the grace of god.”

​There are levels of exhaustion where you can catalogue how tired you feel while continuing to function reasonably well throughout the day. Then, if it gets worse, you have days where you are toast – burned out, unable to move.
 
I bring this up because of friends who have become grandparents. It’s a common refrain in discussions with them.

Multiple friends and relatives in my age bracket (more or less) are helping to watch their grandkids, either one or two days a week. That seems to be the norm.
 
They love the job. They wouldn’t give it up for anything. But, they’re exhausted when each baby/child-watching day is done.

It’s understandable. As one put it, “God gave us the energy to have and raise kids when we were much younger, not after the age of 60.”  So true.
 
With age, the ability to bend over, pick a kid up, crawl around the floor, stay alert for hours on end becomes a chore, regardless of how much you love your grandchild. You wear out.

After hearing over and over the refrain of “how tired I am when I get home,” I posed a question to them: “What are your levels of exhaustion?” Quite intriguing hearing back. Funny, and they paint a realistic picture. Here’s one scale:
 
1)Could do it full time
2)Could easily do it another three days
3)No problem with another day
4)One full day is good enough and I’m tired
5)About halfway through the morning, I’m thinking of Happy Hour
6)By mid-afternoon, I’m trying to devise a game they can play by themselves for the rest of the day
7)Wondering how long we can play hide-and-seek before I pass out, or they can do it by themselves for the rest of the day
8)Put on the longest acceptable movie our daughter and son-in-law permit and take my nap
9)Glad I don’t have kids at our age
10)Tell my wife I’m not feeling well and retire to the guest bedroom at 1 p.m.
If you care for grandkid(s), you can relate to the scale above. You probably have a creative few of your own that you could easily add to the list.
 
Your level of tiredness depends on many things. Are you watching one kid or two (or more)? What ages are the kids? As they develop, you must grow yourself in terms of figuring out ways to keep them busy and engaged. That, in and of itself, adds challenges to your grandparent kid-watching agenda.
 
Here’s another short rating scale I received from my inquiry:
 
1)Mildly tired
2)Need a longer nap
3)Mindless
4)Exhausted
5)Collapsing
Notice the “napping” need. You wear out and want to crash. “Please let me close my eyes for a few minutes, Lord.” It’s a simple and fair prayer.
 
The problem would be that you wouldn’t just nap for 12 minutes. You’d crash, lights out, into dreams that you’d have to swim out of to return to consciousness. And then, you’d have to hop to, and get right back into the fray.
 
Every person I queried LOVES watching their grandkids. They would never give it up. They want to help their kids in any way possible. Maybe we need to invent a position where we hire someone to watch the grandparents so they can get some timeouts during a stressful day. There could be a niche there for the opportunistic entrepreneur.

This could be one of those sappy columns. Be prepared.
 
This past weekend, my wife and I attended the wedding of the brother of our son-in-law. Joyous times. Also, this past weekend, a big name in the basketball officiating community (not someone I know personally, but someone I know well through his talented work for college basketball officials) passed away suddenly. This gave me pause.
 
I wrote a few things down that came to my mind: heart, soul, mind. Life is crucially about these three things.
 
When we have a major impact item occur in our lives, we (at least I do) think a bit differently about the world in which we live. I step back, contemplate, embrace the joy, wallow a bit in the misery.
 
It makes me think: what’s important? What are we made of?
 
After jotting down those three words, I thought a lot about them. We’ve been given something inside that drive us – the heart.
 
You hear the phrase “they have a lot of heart,” and the meaning is deep. It’s something inside you that drives you to care, to do good things, to move on from the bad and seek what’s next in life.
 
“Mind” is deeper, because it delves into more areas. Critical thinking, for example, and how much you apply this in your life. How do you learn? How do you use your knowledge and experience?

The mind drives you. You speculate. You desire. You think. You consider. You mull options.
 
As you go through the mind process (over and over and over every day), there are big and small decisions to weigh where you must operate effectively to address life hurdles. Master the mind – know how and why you think what you do in this world – and your behavior will be more reasoned and consistent. You’ll make good decisions and minimize those bad ones. And hopefully put yourself in positions throughout life that make more sense rather than less sense.
 
Yeah, we get thrown curve balls. But even that spinner can be addressed well by the mind because you’ve prepared. You have the mental framework to adjust accurately. The mind is thoughtfulness, logic, problem solving.
 
Finally, there’s the “soul.” Written and talked about in different ways by different religions and in different ways of life.
 
It’s that energy inside you, perhaps your aura, that comes out. It’s you at your purist sense. Fundamentally, what type of human being are you? What is your soul like? What are you made of? Where does your soul go when you pass?
 
Recently, we spread the ashes of my father-in-law with most of our immediate family attending. It was a somber occasion. Looking around, I thought how all of us grieve and handle those types of moments in different ways. We’re affected in the heart, mind and soul.
 
Those are times we pause and ponder. What’s important in our lives? Are there adjustments should we make?
 
This past week I saw a T-shirt at the workout facility that read, “Make Adjustments, Not Excuses.” It’s a great saying, and relevant to the heart, soul and mind. Make adjustments. Use your mind, think it through. Lead from the heart. Share your soul.

​You probably know someone like this in your life. This is the person who knows best, the individual who can “top” anything you say with something better.
 
We’ll coin this person a “topper.” Because, no matter what you say, they’ll top you.
 
That phrase came to me during a workout session recently from one of my great idea sources. During weekly conversations, he regularly comes up with thoughts, ideas, concepts, situations that I steal and use for this column. He’s a great guy. He shares openly. He dropped the “topper” phrase on me during one of those morning stretching sessions and I thought, “Hmmmm, have to write this one down and explore it a bit.”
 
Let’s say you’re going out to dinner and looking for an Indian restaurant. You’ve heard good things about a local place, the Clay Plot. You mention this to the topper in passing.
 
“Oh no, you should go to the Indian Palace, not the Clay Pot. The Indian Palace has the best food, great spices and a wonderful variety. I’d never go to the Clay Pot,” the topper replies.
 
Now, though the paragraph above is invented, it is also instructive because the topper doesn’t solely offer information or an opinion. That would be okay. We can all use additional information and most of us will listen to an opinion.
 
No, the thing about a topper is that they have to demonstrate how their place is better than your place. As if they need to be number one regarding KNOWING what makes the best Indian restaurant when we all have different barometers for measuring.
 
Another good example has to do with vacationing. Let’s say you enjoy going to the beach and you have a favorite idyllic location based on your personal desires.
 
You’re talking with the topper, “We’re heading to the shore next weekend in Delaware. We’ve been there several times and love it.”
 
The topper replies, “There’s a much better location if you head down to the beach in Maryland. It’s not that far and you’d like the boardwalk. And they have the best ice cream place and cotton candy.”
 
All that is well and good. Nice to hear. Thank you. The topper has once again topped you and let you know how your choice just doesn’t match up.
 
They know better ways to travel, books to read, TV shows, movies.  And don’t get me started on cooking. Yeeeeeeeesh.
 
“That’s how you cook your spaghetti!!??!!,” the topper says, aghast. “I can’t believe you’d do that.”

And they go on to explain in detail how to best boil the noodles, how long to simmer the sauce, what to sautee first and all the ingredients that you left out which would make the dish the best spaghetti ever.
 
“Well, topper, I don’t really care about making my spaghetti to your specifications. Mine tastes pretty darn good and people seem to love it. So,there, take that.”
 
The thing is, we never seem to say that to the topper. We swallow, roll our eyes, say to ourselves, “Here we go again,” and listen politely to hear how their way is the best way.

My workout buddy and I wondered how much the toppers know about the way we feel about them, whether they know a term has been coined just for them and it’s not a positive.

A lot has been written this past week on the bad behavior of U.S. fans at last week’s Ryder Cup. Here’s a different observation on what occurred.
 
If you watched the first two days, you saw the U.S. get waxed. Fans were jerks, jeering the Europeans and cheering when they hit a poor shot.
 
Focusing on the negative, the Europeans thrived off the goading U.S. fans. They stepped up. They played great.

Conversely, the U.S. players were not invigorated by the poor sportsmanship. They didn’t have much energy.
 
Sunday, what happened? U.S. fans focused on cheering for their team. Though not perfect, for the most part, the stood up for their team and focused on positivity.
 
And, what was the result? Instead of folding, the U.S. almost staged one of the greatest comebacks in golf history.
 
What does this say? I’m not going to argue the change in the direction of the fans focus from negative to positive (for the most part) improved the outcome, but I will argue it contributed to the U.S. resurgence on Sunday.
 
Here’s why. Over and over and over and over again, I see in sports where fans target sports officials (referee and umpires) with their ire. They finger point. They assess blame. “They blew that call and that’s why we lost.”
 
As a basketball referee myself, I see this syndrome constantly. A coach berates you. His team plays with a nasty edge. The players take on the personality of the coach.
 
One of our enforcement tools is a technical foul. When you hit the coach with a deserved technical foul for his verbal harassment, ALMOST ALWAYS their teams starts to play better.
 
Here’s one example (I could insert a multitude of examples, but this will suffice) from basketball games I’ve officiated in recent seasons. There was a 15-year-old male coaching a fifth grade girls team. He didn’t know what he was doing, but he thought he did.
 
The girls must have thought he did, too, because as he began to mouth off in the first half, they played worse and worse, taking actions against the other team (causing us to call even more fouls on them) as their coach yelled at us. Enough. I gave him a technical foul. Things calmed down.

Early in the second half, he went off on my partner. No brainer for me. I assessed another technical foul and tossed him from the gym, then went over to the parents and suggested one of them needed to coach. A woman came over.

She supported the girls, used an encouraging tone of voice. Holy cow, the girls responded. They handled the ball better, made better decisions, closed the gap a bit in a game where they were decisively the inferior team. They improved.
 
I’ve seen this happen again and again on the basketball court. When you hit a coach with a tech for their out-of-control behavior, they start to coach rather than blame the officials for the bad play of their team. Players respond to the change. Momentum swings
 
Many U.S. fans at the Ryder Cup need to understand this (and perhaps a segment of US society as well). Quit being nasty jerks. If you cheer, if you act in a positive manner, people respond, teams respond. You get the desired result. Attacking others doesn’t get you where you want to go. Our country can use that reminder.

The other day as I was leaving the fitness center after working out, I took the towel that they give you when you enter, pulled my bathing suit out and tossed it into the towel container as I walked to my car to drive away with their towel. I almost got to my car.
 
“Oh yeah, what the heck am I doing?” I turned around, made a joke to the attendant, went to the towel depository, took my bathing suit out and tossed the towel in. Now I could go home.

If you are like me, this type of incident has probably happened to you. With age, this seems to happen more often. Throw one thing where the other thing is supposed to go.
 
Many years ago, there was a humorous British clip of an older woman entering her home. She puts her keys down, then sees the plants wilting, so she decides to water them. Then she looks at the mail and forgets where her keys are. She puts her glasses down to look for her keys, and when she finds them, she can’t remember where her glasses are. And so on. You get the point.

She dithers around, losing her brain. The title of the clip is something to the effect of, “This is why you feel tired and nothing ever gets done.” We get distracted. We place things without thinking. We forget.
 
One of my all-time favorites, which I like to admit because it’s so damn funny and shows our humanity, is when I’m done eating cereal. That means it’s time to put the milk in the pantry and the cereal box in the refrigerator. Seriously, I can’t count the amount of times I’ve either done that or come extremely close to doing that. I whack myself on the forehead with an open palm and go, “Dude, what are you thinking?”
 
This is mostly about not paying attention. We go on automatic pilot.
 
Just today, after eating lunch, I put the lettuce in the drawer where we normally keep cheese and meat and put the cheese and turkey in the lettuce drawer in the frig. Didn’t even know I did it until dinner when I went to make us salads for dinner, and I open the lettuce drawer, “Where the heck is the lettuce? Oh yeah, I bet I know what I did.” And, of course, I did. Reverse where things should go.

Knowing this about yourself and your personality and forgetfulness is good. You learn from it. After the cheese/lettuce debacle, I said to myself afterwards, “Now, REMEMBER, the next time you can’t find the lettuce or cheese to look in the other container. You probably misplaced it.” That’s a good reminder to teach you where to find things. Look at places where you tend to put things where they don’t belong.

To make this syndrome useful, you must first recognize it in yourself. Then commit to memory the goofy thing you did which didn’t make any sense. Then focus on that until it makes sense and you can find those things you need to find.
 
When our kids were young, one of my favorite phrases to help them find something they thought they’d lost was, “Retrace your steps.” If you can’t develop your own system for proper and safe placement of materials, you can always use that as your fallback. It works. And, maybe if you video yourself, you can take on the Brits with a humorous take on how forgetful many of us are.

​I have to write about this topic. I’ve raised it with numerous friends who are in my age bracket. Let’s call that the “post-60 crowd.” You can probably extend that on either end of 60 a bit.
 
The trend has been noticeable for several years, hence the age bracket definition. The issue is: threading your feet through your pants without falling down. Or, to be more realistic, how difficult it is to get your feet through the workout pants, jeans or dress pants, without catching your toes and becoming a contortionist. Why is this?
 
Let’s start with the morning ritual. You get up, do you normal start-of-day things, and at some point meander over to your clothes drawer to pull out a pair of stretch pants you wear to work out in. Simple enough.

They are made of soft fabric. Easily malleable. Ten years ago, you hopped right in and were off.
 
Not so today. Something has happened to turn your toes into clubs. They seem to have become immovable objects, unable to react to the sliding on of the pants with grace. They choose to catch the sides of the long pants and adhere the way thorns do. Stick and stay.
 
This, of course, causes you to lose balance. You stand on one foot. “Okay, this is easy enough.” All of a sudden, your toes are caught on the side of the fabric and you find yourself falling towards the bed. As you topple over, like a tall building that was just dynamited (TIMBER!!!), you put out your arm to catch yourself on the edge of the bed, straining your shoulder and elbow socket, while bellowing at the dog to stop make you lose your balance. Damn dog.
 
Really, it’s about aging and losing flexibility and balance. It’s hard to stand on one foot. Combine that with actually trying to do something while standing on one foot -- like inserting the other foot into a constricted space and making it go where you want it to go intuitively – and you have the coming disaster.

Seriously, I have had this discussion with many people in my age bracket and trying to put on your pants while standing is a significant issue. Why not sit?, you ask. Duh. We do. But it feeds the view of ourselves being old codgers, which we are, but somehow want to not fully label ourselves that way yet. Maybe we’re partial old codgers (POCs).
 
In the OLD days, I would stand up and abra cadabra, shove each foot through in seconds, and off you go. Oh, for those bygone days!
 
When does the syndrome start?  When you turn 59? Is 65 the magic year? I don’t know.
 
All I do know is that this affects everyone I’ve spoken with in this age bracket who is willing to honestly share the difficulties they have with their feet sliding into pants. Us POCs have one more thing to worry about that can lead to head injuries. The AARP needs to get on this and cover the syndrome, along with solutions.
 
We need to develop some form of toe flexibility exercises. Stretch, twist, rotate. That will help, but (sigh), sitting down and acting like a true old codger instead of a POC seems to be the best solution.
 
Now, don’t get me started on pulling your socks off while you’re standing up. That’s doom.

​I like ferries. This has been true for many years.
 
As a young child, I remember taking a ferry across to Martha’s Vineyard. You could smell the ocean, feel the breeze. Even as a kid there was some subconscious pull – watching the world go by, heading from one place to another – that gave me a warm feeling inside.
 
This past week, several members of our family ferried from Rockland, ME to Vinalhaven Island. We planned to e-bike the island. The weather was spectacular – crystal clear, a slight breeze, virtually no ripples in the water.
 
Setting off, you watch the world fall behind. I think that is part of the pull – the sense of watching the terrain recede, and then the anticipation of heading off to someplace new and worth exploring.
 
Us humans are explorers. I think ferries play to that. We prepare for the unknown, riding along, pondering what’s coming next. We anticipate. It feels good.
 
At the same time, you take in images of the world going slowly by. That is another big reason ferries hit my nostalgia button. You’re not catapulting around in a gasoline-fired engine, hurtling through stop lights, in traffic, worrying, paying strict attention to everything so that you stay safe. In that environment, you don’t appreciate the views, the surroundings outside your vehicle.

On a ferry, it’s all about what’s outside the boat. You’re watching birds, checking for porpoises or puffins or whales. You watch the fir trees sway in the wind. Seagulls ride the wind currents and you marvel at their ability to coast without flapping their wings. How far can they glide? Seaweed swirls in the water below. You smell salt and fish.
 
Back in 1982, when I bicycled across North America, I slowed down and ferried through the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington state. It was bucolic, a pause in my trek that allowed me to step back and drink the Pacific Northwest environment. What a rush.
 
Last year, our son set up a ferry ride from Milwaukee across Lake Michigan to Muskegon for an annual golf outing we hold with his cousins and my brothers. We left very early in the morning. As land receded, it kicked off the start of a voyage, one that not only included the boat ride, but what was to come later in the week as we golfed, sat around the fire pit, shared stories and decompressed from life’s worries.
 
A ferry contributes to that feeling. Somehow you are released. You’re not the driver, so you can let go of those concerns. You can roam the boat, park your butt where you get the best views or just hang in the fresh air, breathing through your nose the smells wafting across the water.
 
A ferry means a change of scenery. You’re going somewhere, letting go and moving forward.
 
“Slow down, you’re movin’ too fast. Gotta make the mornin’ last.” Ride the ferry.

​Several weeks ago, one of the guys I chat with while working out in the morning saw my pair of socks and couldn’t help himself. “Last in the rotation, eh?,” he said to me.
 
I laughed, knowing exactly what he meant: every other pair of socks must have been in the laundry for me to pull out the gaudy pair I was wearing. While that wasn’t actually the case, there was merit in his point.

One thing I do regularly is wear my clothes. Seems simple. When saying, “I wear my clothes,” I mean “all” of them. If I don’t wear a shirt, pair of pants, shoes, jacket, whatever, for an extended period of time, I put that item into the recycling bin for our local reuse store, Salvation Army or Goodwill.  Better off that someone else gets to wear it if
 
The socks I wore that morning had a Christmas theme. Santa playing golf or something like that. So, given it was August, my buddy at the fitness facility knew something was up. Not Christmas, so these socks shouldn’t be in the rotation. Hence his comment, “Last in the rotation, eh?”
 
His phrase made me laugh. It implies what you’re wearing is outrageous or outdated, something like that. So bad that someone will comment.
 
Sometimes I wonder if I wear things like those socks to see if they will elicit a comment. See whether people are paying attention. That might have been the case here, I don’t remember.
 
When flying, I wear a shirt to see how people will react in the airport. It has a set of golf clubs on it with the phrase, “Life is filled with difficult choices.” I love it. It’s amusing and says something about life and decision-making. I wear that shirt because I want to see if people will read and react. Start a conversation.
 
Engaging others is part of T-shirt slogans. We wear that kind of stuff to see what others have to say. While my socks weren’t on that morning to serve this function, they must have been out-of-place by enough to ring my buddy’s buzzer.
 
When he explained the “rotation” phrase to me (where it originated), it made even more sense to me. His “rotation” story came from a friend.

His friend was fond of wearing an electric orange shirt. Considering the color, it stood out. But, it sounds like from my friend’s description that the orange was a bit over the top. A color no one would wear in public. You’d only wear it if it was last in the rotation.
 
The phrase is good for a chuckle, mildly mocking while recognizing the individual’s crazy fashion style. Which reminds me of another classic, “Hey, did you get dressed the dark?” That’s another story.
 
Seriously, I rotate my clothes. As they emerge from the closet or dresser drawer, it’s the items that have been hanging around the longest that I wear next. This leads to Christmas socks in August.
 
Yeah, sometimes I shake it up just to shake it up. Otherwise, I actually attempt to match up the colors of my shirts with my shorts and socks. That was likely the case that morning at the workout facility. Regardless of the rationale, it sparked some laughs and there’s a lot to be said for that.

Several months back, a friend from high school asked me an unusual question. He asked me to write him a letter. Not sure of his intentions, I let the request percolate for multiple weeks, probably out of laziness more than anything else.
 
Writing a letter takes thought. You need to consider what to say, how to say it, craft the messages in each paragraph so there is something worthwhile.

There’s no reason to write a letter that doesn’t have anything to say. What’s the point? Boring or mundane subject matter doesn’t lighten up anybody. 
 
There’s a certain nostalgia value to writing and getting letters. My friend might have considered that in asking me to write, I don’t know. You have to wait for the mail to arrive. There is anticipation. Then you take your time reading through what is written. You hold the paper in your hands, and that’s something, too.
 
I come from a letter writing family and a letter writing time in history. Our family lived in Brazil for two years when I was in sixth and seventh graders. Our maternal grandfather, a newspaper man himself, sent us weekly updates from Closter, N.J., filled with humous anecdotes and the goings-on of the neighbors, local animals and our aunts, uncles and cousins. Perhaps I took the hook then.
 
You couldn’t wait for the next letter to arrive. It was like getting a present in the mail.
 
In today’s rapid-fire world, that doesn’t happen. With instantaneous communication, we don’t wait. We launch. Someone texts you and within seconds you respond. This continues until the dialogue fades away. Do you remember what was said?
 
A letter, instead, is more consumable. You savor it. You take your time. You think more about what was said. Implicitly, that gives it more meaning. Plus, you know the person writing to you at a bare minimum took the extra effort to commit words to paper. That means something, too.
 
Another value of writing a letter is the point of “thinking.” You must think ahead, plan your words, sentences, statements, messages, stories. That typically creates more meaning.

Again, if you contrast that with the back and forth that occurs in electronic transmissions, you gain emotionally, mentally and psychologically from a written letter (whether writing or receiving).
 
A letter helps you put issues in perspective. You’re not instantaneously reacting. You’re more often pondering.
 
There’s one more plus. It’s also about the differences in comparing a written letter vs. today’s yo-yoing messaging.
 
I believe in letter writing, you more clearly hear your voice. You take the time to understand where you’re coming from and where you want to go.
 
And, I think that also cuts to some of the agitation we see and hear about online these days. When you react without fully understanding your voice (of without considering what you really want to say), uglier things come out. You say things you shouldn’t. The mean spirit arrives.
 
My friend has not responded to my letter yet. In time, I believe he will. Perhaps he is waiting for something significant to occur in his life so he can craft the story on paper. We will see.

Part of the fun and joy is the waiting, the anticipation. There is no instant gratification in letter writing. There’s a lesson in that.