Today, CBS Sunday Morning wondered if the thank you note is a dead thing. Well, certainly it is dying. Do I plan on spending the next several paragraphs bemoaning the shuffling out of the thank you note? Perhaps! I’m not very sure where this is heading.
Let’s state outright that I understand why people don’t write notes. I am hardly a powerhouse of these things, but I write them. My manager from my previous work is allegedly still fussing over the one I sent to her. I write thank you notes to everyone I’ve met from the Internet, particularly as meeting them involved in every case their providing me insight into their towns. I write thank you notes to people who send me gifts. I drew a thank you note when I was eight to my grandparents; the note was on the fridge for at least a decade. I wrote a thank you note to myself once, left it in my wallet.
This particular segment related the thank you note to the curtsy, two things we should be pleased to cast away. Hell no, I say. Curtsying retains flexibility and balance, far as I can tell - no harm in it. I reckon I grew up in a household which demanded the thank you note. We weren’t staunchly mannerly. I was told, for example, to never “sir” or “ma’am,” and as an adult, to not feel obligated to “Mr.” or Mrs.” I should never present myself as being inferior, and even as a child, my voice was as worthy of the airspace as any adult’s. Likewise, I was expected to be a conscientious child, and I certainly wasn’t going to get away without expressing thanks.
Are words that are handwritten any more meaningful than those in an email? I don’t know, probably not, but maybe so. You could argue that if someone goes through the trouble of putting a stamp on an envelope, then they must mean it; rattling off an email is simple and careless, nothing exists between the lines. But let’s not get carried away and presumptuous - words are words. Despite how hard we may try, the receiver can manipulate them to say what they want them to say anyway, making the words and the medium pretty unimportant.
Getting letters from people you care about is an entirely different thing altogether. Being able to touch what they have touched that has touched many of their things that has soaked in the air around them - well, that can’t be beat! E-mail can’t compete with that, video chat can’t compete with that, you sitting in bed next to me can’t compete with that. Having a tactile memento of a person small enough to fit in a pocket with enough context to build up enough happiness to last days is one of the finer things in the world.
People just make too much of writing, as if it needs to be hard and mulled over for days. I will admit that I tend to type out letters before writing them, which is a terrible byproduct of blogging and my comfort in knowing that things can be cut out and rearranged. Not so in a letter! and I will be damned if I render a letter-pressed card useless by an err of the hand as led by a faulty mind.
Now, in the television segment, one man offered that you write thank you notes to honor. I suppose maybe he meant to honor the gift or deed, but my initial interpretation was to honor yourself, to present yourself as a respectable person.
OK, quick - I need to find a purpose to this whole post. I suppose what I am saying is, well, 01) I should write more letters generally, and 02) I don’t think it matters how you provide thanks, just take the slight effort and ultimate privilege to do it. Don’t allow people to get to the point where receiving thanks from you is a surprise, you asshole.
