Theresa and Elysia have been back in Melbourne for 4 days now. Today Theresa received an email from someone, a relative, asking if they will be in Malaysia till the Chinese New Year. I guess she didn’t have time to say goodbye to all relatives, and I guess there were no opportunities for all relatives to keep up with all the traffic to and from Malaysia during this holiday period. I couldn’t help but sense that given even more time, less relatives would have an attachment to us, and vice versa.

That’s the nature of relationships. If little or no efforts are invested into keeping the ties fresh and interesting, they dry up over time and soon perhaps, there is no cause to exchange words anymore.

I realise that with some email exchanges as well. After a while somehow the exchanges dry up. It takes efforts to keep the flow going and sometimes we all get caught up with the activities immediately surrounding us we neglect these efforts.

I remember the days when Theresa and I were dating, back in the days when the aerogram was the medium through which we corresponded. On a good week I’d get 2, even 3 letters in those blue aerograms, from her. To get these, I had to of course write to her. They took a lot of effort, but we didn’t feel like they did. We had to buy a stack of the aerogram, pre-fold them (to avoid writing on spaces likely to be torn up while opening the precious thing), use a good biro and make sure I think a lot before filling in the approximately 1.3 pages of spaces.

I had to think because it required planning. It had to be on something and have a reasonably smooth structure to the flow. It had to end before one runs out of space. It also had to end not too early, leaving acres of space which tells the recipient you didn’t have much to say to her. It cannot be written with suddenly shrinking letters or suddenly enlarged letters, for the same reasons. After the contents are finished, the address had to be written out in full with care, to ensure it actually arrives at the desired destination. The writer’s address at the back must also be carefully written, again in long hand, to ensure that it gets returned to you if for some reason it is not delivered.

Then it all has to be taken down the road somewhere or to a union shop on campus, to be dropped into a mailbox.

Contrast all of the above with the modern email. If you think of something to say to someone, you simply pressed “Alt-Tab” to get to the email software. You typed the first 3 or 4 characters of your recipient’s address and the auto-complete function completes this address. You then type out your message – as long or as short you want it to be, without pre-meditation – at the end of which you simply hit the “send” button. The recipient gets it in the next few seconds, or minutes at worst. The whole exercise can be completed within 15 minutes tops. I have regularly sent several messages in a day just to keep in touch, all taking less than 2-3 minutes each.

Yet in spite of the wonderfully convenient, truncated and near effortless tool of the email, we have not kept in touch better than in earlier, pre-email days. We still drop out of sight. Some relatives of mine have taken to constructing their extensive personal newsletters which are then sent out en masse, almost as a junk mail, which of course they aren’t. That is a wonderful method to stay in touch, and let other know what has been happening to us. Personally however, I prefer the quick 1-2 short paragraphs which are sent out every other week or so (preferably even every other day), even if they don’t say much.

I exploit the email endlessly. I love sending email messages and love receiving them even more (especially non-work related ones!). Like all correspondence however, the key to an interesting email exchange can be found in the word “exchange”. The more the merrier.