A stamp is a miracle.
For just fifty-eight cents, someone will come to your house to collect a letter you’ve written and hand-deliver it to the house of someone else anywhere in the country.
Heck, back in the old days, you had to be royalty with great wealth and servants at your beck and call if you wanted a personal message delivered to someone in your kingdom.
Even now, if you lived in Miami, how much time, money, and effort would it take you to hand-deliver a birthday card to a friend in Seattle? Depending on whether you took a plane or car, and if you had any overnight stays involved, it might cost you a thousand dollars or more.
Instead, a mailman will do it for the tidy sum of fifty-eight cents, and you can stay on your couch in your pajamas polishing off a pint of Chubby Hubby.
Miraculous.
It makes me wonder why we don’t avail ourselves of this magic more often. Because perhaps the best part of the whole thing is receiving a real greeting card or a handwritten letter from someone else. You have a permanent record of someone’s inner thoughts, and a relic of them, in the form of their own handwriting, their unique signature. They had to lick the envelope. They affixed the stamp. It’s like a little craft project, made just for you.
It’s extraordinary because it’s rare. We don’t do snail mail much anymore; it takes too long. An email or a text is quicker.
In this harried world, there is something special knowing that someone had to hit pause on their day, on purpose, to complete a physical action that took longer than pounding out a few keystrokes on their laptop. That’s the coolest part: the indisputable fact that they were thinking of you. You mattered to them. And they gave someone very specific instructions to deliver that message directly to you, as quickly as possible.
All for fifty-eight cents.
This isn’t an advertisement for the postal service, although they do have some amazing people in their ranks. It’s a reminder that there are miracles all around us.
If you can’t see them, you’re not paying attention.
I hope this inspires you to send a miracle to someone today.
[ 💌 Want a printable version you can print and share with your favorite postal worker? Here you go! ]