The other day at the weekly small group I attend, my friend Casey observed that there is something about prayer that brings him to the present. Entering that intentional state of mind and communication makes him more present to God, and to the people he prays with, and the people he prays for, to an extent that he simply doesn’t reach in many other moments of his day to day. I immediately found this observation to be true in my own life, and this got me thinking about the other sorts of moments when I feel most present to God and to others.
One conclusion has been that, like prayer, writing is a means for me to engage life more closely, more intentionally. When I write I find that I am more attentive to the topic or scene or people at hand, and when I attempt to articulate my observations I am most careful in my communication with others. More so than in speech, I anticipate how others will encounter my words.
I wish I paid my friends and family this sort of attentiveness in our regular communication. With moving around so much, however, the face-to-face encounters I have with loved ones are too far between, and even as I am unbelievably dependent on my cell phone and laptop, I struggle to simply return calls and emails. I barely keep up and, unfortunately, I rarely feel that I can be fully present to the calls and emails that I do respond to in a timely fashion because of this.
That’s why I am going to attempt to bridge writing–a discipline that brings me to the present in profound ways–and my regular communication with loved ones–something that is often lacking my full attention. It is a humble pledge: I hope to simply write one, quality snail-mail letter a week until the New Year. But I hope that this will even slightly increase the moments when my loved ones feel, well, loved by me…
