I read a novel recently set in rural Ireland in the early 1950s.

A super small village, untouched by new tech or much outside change.

There was -- quite literally -- one phone in town.

It was used for the big things. Births, weddings. Who’d died, who’d passed on.

And you had about five minutes to talk, maybe less. 

Because not only were a half-dozen other villagers waiting right beside you, eager for their turn, but once the clock ran out, the rates jumped to something most families couldn’t afford.

So… five minutes was what you had.

And that was fine.

Most calls were quick. Status updates. This happened, that happened, etc.

But if you had a story… something complicated, something juicy, something that -- god forbid -- took longer than five minutes… you’d give the person on the other end a headline.

Maybe two. 

(“You’ll never believe what Jerry’s son called the PRIEST!”, or, “Mike’s fiancé, Rose, hasn’t been able to get out of bed in weeks!”)

And then, right as you hit the edge of your five minutes, you’d say:

I’ll tell you all about it in a letter.

That was all you could do.

And maybe that wasn’t such a bad system.

Some things weren’t meant to be said in a rush, squeezed into an elevator pitch. 

Yes, it’s a novel I’m talking about above. 

But the idea behind it reflects something that was true for a very long time.

Letter-writing wasn’t quaint. It wasn’t like, awww, that’s cute. 

It was the main mode of comms. It was the infrastructure.

It was how people fell in love, how they stayed in love. How they fought wars and built countries and tried to make sense of their lives.

John and Abigail Adams wrote more than 1,100 letters to each other. Politics, loneliness, flirtation, arguments. You can literally watch the American Revolution unfolding across their pages.

George Washington wrote thousands of letters over his lifetime. The private correspondence between him and Martha was so personal that she burned most of it after his death, trying to preserve the one thing their public lives rarely allowed: privacy.

Vinny van Gogh wrote more than 800 letters to his brother, Theo. He stressed about money, fame, failure, loneliness. He wrote about needing new paint brushes. About the strange mixture of hope and despair that seemed to constantly live inside him. 

Hemingway’s letters were blunt, funny, brutal. When F. Scott Fitzgerald sent him a copy of Tender Is the Night, Hemingway famously wrote back that he tried to “put the shit in the wastebasket.” In other letters he wrote about fishing trips, dead cats, wars, and hangovers.

We used to conduct love, philosophy, and grief through ink.

Presidents did it. Poets did it. Painters did it.

Entire marriages lived on paper.

And then somewhere along the way, we traded all that in.

Now we FaceTime from the grocery store aisle, we fire off auto-corrected texts to group chats nobody reads, and, guilty as charged, we send voice notes that disappear unless someone scrambles to hit “keep” in tiny blue font.

Faster.

Easier.

And somehow, so incredibly thin.

I’m not founding a country, but I do have two kids (same thing, basically). 

My daughter is eight, my son just turned eleven.

Since the day they were born, I’ve kept a journal for each of them.

Forty-plus pages now, each year its own section, its own theme. 

I mostly write about dumb stuff.

The mispronounced words (pasghetti), the foods they just started to eat (tomatoes), the strange little obsessions that come and go (collecting random rocks like they’re priceless).

I write about the quirks, the challenges.

About how my son refused to wear underwear until third grade. Absolute refused. Then one morning at the bus stop his pants accidentally came down and that was finally the end of that particular debate.

I try to write the things that won’t show up in pictures or iPhone videos.

The texture of that time period.

The small stories that would otherwise disappear.

Because if I don’t put them somewhere, I’m afraid they’ll just be gone.

Most of our lives are now optimized for speed.

Podcasts at 1.5x. Headlines shrunk for mobile.

The mediums keep getting smaller, and we’ve told ourselves it’s fine.

But, it isn’t.

Abigail Adams wasn’t cranking out pissed off texts from the school pickup line while John was in Philadelphia founding a country.

And Van Gogh wasn’t posting to Instagram from the asylum at Saint-Rémy.

Instead, they sat down. They took up space on a page. They put ink to paper. 

And ultimately, they said, this thing matters. 

They said, I want you to know what I was thinking.

That’s what a letter does that nothing else does.

Snaps disappear. Emails can be fired off fast.

But nobody writes a letter by accident.

I think that instinct still shows up, just in smaller ways.

Sometimes when I’m writing in those journals, I slow down without meaning to. 

I ask myself, is this story worth it? Will they care? Or am I just trying to make it last a little longer?

I don’t know the answer. 

But when my kids turn eighteen, I’m going to gather those journals.

Clean them up. Add photos. And maybe try to design something beautiful. 

A record of what it felt like to raise them.

I’m not sure exactly what I hope they feel when they read it.

There’s a real chance they think: wow, this dude is really crazy. 

Or, Dad, who even had the time for this?

But, I hope they feel like i was there the whole time.

I hope they feel like someone was paying close enough attention to write it all down.

If you liked this blog post, you might enjoy this other one on dealing with imposter syndrome, or creating one-on-one time w/ your kids.

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