106 _
On a visit to Stockholm, Sweden, I ducked into a café
and started to write myself a letter. ‘Hey!’ I wrote.
‘Remember me? It’s you.’
For the past year, I’ve packed envelopes, sealing wax,
stamps, and ink for my fountain pen for trips abroad. I buy
stationery in the towns I visit, write myself letters, then
make an adventure of finding a post office. The letters
sometimes arrive before I return; sometimes they take
several months. The one I wrote in Stockholm was
intended to scare myself out of bringing so much work
with me on vacation in the future. I had just become a
freelance journalist and I was terrified of saying no to
assignments. What was supposed to be a month-long trip
of a lifetime, visiting friends in Europe and taking time to
disconnect, was anything but relaxing. I spent my days
looking for places to settle in for a few hours of work, and
I stayed up until the early hours answering emails.
‘I want to give you some advice for the next time you
travel,’ I wrote. ‘First, do not bring so much work next
time. You brought way too much stress with you. You
had a really hard time enjoying so many cities. It was
not a waste of money. You will think this when you get
the bills. But you have learned a lot.’ I warned myself
against taking my time for granted. ‘Time = money,’ I
wrote in a long list of things I’d learned on my trip. ‘But
time also equals time. With more time and less money,
you would have enjoyed yourself more.’THOUGHTS ABOUT YOUR LIFE
I find a clarity while in another country, trying on another
reality. It’s easier to understand what matters most to me
and what I can do without. It’s somehow easier for me to
write a letter to myself and send it off than it is to capture
everything in a journal. My journal is a disorganized
stream of consciousness, where I dump feelings, fears,
accomplishments and dreams. There, I write for that
moment, getting things down on paper that I need to sort
through. My letters are often written as if my near-future
self is another person, someone who hasn’t seen the
same sunsets and beaches I have. I do occasionally flipthrough old journals years later to see how I’ve changed.
But it feels quite different when a letter arrives in the
mail. Instead of writing for my far-off future self, I’m
writing for the self I’ll become in just a couple of weeks
or months. I want to show that person the world I’m
living in at the moment I’m writing from, to bring her
back to a moment of happiness I never want to forget.
Not long ago, I looked through an old journal of mine
and found a quote I had copied from an article about
traveling by one of my favorite writers, American
journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner. ‘The gift of travel is to
think about your life,’ she wrote in an article for Afar in- ‘The prison of travel is that your thoughts about
your life remain in the country where you had them.’ I
want to catch that clarity and keep it, so I can look back
at it when I need it.
In a letter I recently wrote from a desert-island
beach in Baja California, Mexico, I described the deep
sapphire and teal shades of the ocean, the pelicans that
dive-bombed a school of sardines a few hundred meters
from shore, and the feeling of being totally still, content
to stare at nature without feeling the need to do anything.
I was at peace. My hope is that I’ll receive this letter
when I most need it. I’m often anxious about deadlines,
to-do lists, upcoming projects and a lack of time, and I
know this letter will be calming to read. In a letter I
mailed in late February from Hokkaido, Japan, I wrote
of the contentment I found soaking in silence in a hot
spring spa in the Shiretoko Peninsula. I loved kneeling in
the hot water of the outdoor bath while breathing in frigid
air, overlooking magnificent piles of drift ice floating in
from Siberia, colliding with the shore of the Sea of
Okhotsk. I thanked myself for finally learning how to
turn off work while traveling. I ended the letter with an
open-ended goal: ‘Do less so you can be more’.
WHOLE-BODY EXPERIENCE
Dr. Steven Toepfer, an associate professor of human
development and family studies at Kent State
University, US, gave me some insight. His research has‘My letters are often written as if my near-future self is
another person, someone who hasn’t seen the same sunsets’