Member-only story
What if Email Was Very Slow on Purpose?
Maybe it’s okay if we take our own sweet time for certain tasks.
We still use mailboxes.
Every day someone gathers letters and packages and takes them to the next stop on the way to an address you wrote by hand.
We have tools that allow us to communicate instantly, and there are other ways to deliver things.
We don’t depend on mailboxes, but we like having them around.
We might like a new app called Pony Messenger for the same reason.
Slow can be good
When I was a child, I wrote letters.
My mother and I lived on different continents. I did not know how much I missed her at the time. I was sure that I loved to write and to receive letters.
I remember that the airmail paper was blue and thinner than the regular kind. I put a lined piece underneath to keep my cursive neat and wrote what I wanted to say in pencil first, then copied it.
The French words for by airplane were printed on the sheets — par avion—the paper folded into an envelope as if by magic.
Pony Messenger is an act of nostalgia for the sensation from the past.
