I Might Try Email

I have been avoiding my email for approximately 13 years.

Checking my email feels like walking into an Everything Must Go sale at the Christmas Tree Shop.

I can’t remember the last time I opened my inbox.

How many trips around the world have I won, and missed out on?

How many would have been lovers risked it all only to never hear back from me?

How many chain letters am I now cursed forever for not forwarding?

When I hear the ping of an email come in, my lazy eye goes sideways, my teeth chatter, my shoulders tighten. It’s like a knock on the door when it’s snowing, I’m in my jams, sipping red wine and watching Killing Eve. Whatever it is, don’t want! Whatever it is, pass!

I find I use the imagery “life lunging at me” often in life, which means I’m constructing a world where I feel life is happening at me. I use that phrase a lot when I think of email.

Hmm.

Back to Wayfair coops and satisfaction surveys.

Anyway, I might try email. See what all the fuss is about and maybe, as an added bonus, overcome a paralyzing fear of life while getting $10 bucks off a pair of Hokas.

We’ll see.

Is Email Life? And Other Things I'll Tell my Kids

When my kids are old enough, and definitely after they exist, I'm going to tell them: "Life is email. Life is email, and making new passwords because you've forgotten your old ones. Life is also wailing about all the things you have to do and not doing any of them until it's almost too late. So ya, where was I? Life is email, making passwords and kvetching balanced with procrastination." Then I'll remember after a couple seconds to add, "And contesting parking tickets. And meetings. Lots and lots of meetings. Meetings where people are told to do stuff and then at the next meeting, no one's done it. Meetings where everyone's late and if someone goes to look for someone whose late, the late person arrives and now the seeker is late. Meetings where you'll rush to fill the silence or else you'll think you might drown in it."

I'll tell them "If you're not doing any of these things, you've nailed it. You've made it." I hope it means they've become a traveling mime or a professional surfer. I hope it means they pay an assistant very well to take care of all their emails and forgotten passwords, to do lists and dishes, so they can wax their boards and practice miming what it's like to tight-rope walk over Niagara. Maybe my kids will bring back the megaphone and just blast all their messages through the streets over the air. They'll say, "Forget email. I'm just going to blast this message across a one mile radius and call it good." 

I won't really tell them that life is meetings and email, but I will warn them that it can easily become that if they're not careful. I'll also repeat what E. B. White told us is important in his mouse tale Stuart Little: A shaft of sunlight at the end of a dark afternoon, a note in music, and the way the back of a baby's neck smells if its mother keeps it tidy.