Purging prose

  As I purged my emails from the last six months this morning I felt as if I'd just read a book. And yes, I do keep some that long due to working with clients and making sure their needs are met even after the project has been wrapped up. Others are sentimental, friends found, friends lost and the stories I've been told along the way. The ones that made me laugh, the ones that commiserated or unloaded pangs of regret made me realize these emails did indeed constitute a book, the pages that make up our every day lives.


  I am completely amazed at some of the comments shared with clients, how we really got to know each other and became a part of each other's lives. How many I am still in touch with - the interaction of creating a new space created a bond of friendship. I came across conversations with friends old and new, places and joys we shared via email. Like the chance meeting of Chris Botti before a concert in Baltimore, or the immediate OMG's over a social faux pas, emotions and thoughts were transmitted into black and white type. Snippets of time sent into cyberspace...are these the fabric of our lives? Emails composed with the poetic turn of a phrase, the kudos and the guffaws silently testify to the minutia that create the milestones. There is that instant reaction that gives the characters on a keyboard an inflection all their own.
                                               

  The generation that has grown up with computers will never know anything but keyboards large and small. But how I long for the days of a hand-written note, eloquently penned on a fine Crane paper. Penmanship that peeks into a personality, a small glimpse into the writer itself.

  I recall a line from the movie The Last Samurai - "A person could contemplate one cherry blossom for his entire lifetime and that life would not be wasted."

   Much like the glimpses into our everyday, these seemingly insignificant emails open the window of our experience...and a morning in contemplation of those experiences is not a morning wasted.