Webupon

It seems to be the week to give up your inbox for Lent, or at least a bunch of articles on the topic, kick-started by an article on Zen Habits, collided with my personal routine realm of blog reading this week.  As such, the idea of junking my inbox has been on my mind the past couple of days and that whole thought process has brought me to some interesting conclusions.

Let me say straight out that I’m not bashing any of the people who wrote these articles.  In fact, I wholehearted respect their positions and their attempts to stay balanced in life, limit or eliminate e-mail, and communicate in ways that are meaningful as well as efficient for them.  That’s a good thing.  The communication major in me approves.  And the English minor in me is always mindful that the English language is a living thing, malleable and evolving as society changes.  (Okay, admittedly, it may drive me crazy that kids spell “later” with an eight these days, but my righteous indignation may or may not be justified in that response.)  “Perhaps e-mail is getting outdated?”  The thought was a challenging one for me on a theoretical level.

On an emotional level, there was something that made me cringe about the thought of giving up my e-mail all together.  My own love affair with my inbox started in grade twelve when I transferred to a private high-school, in a different city, about 2 hours away from the public high-school I had attended from grade nine until grade eleven.  The sudden change of environment, lack of new friends and my own unwillingness to adapt to my surroundings left me confused and, a lot of the time, pretty depressed.   I spent hours writing letters home…time that, now, I look back at and appreciate.  Those letters taught me to chronicle my own life.  They gave me a love for the craft of writing and taught me the joy that comes from getting into the rhythm and flow of a story.  The only downside to those letters were that they took a week to get from Beamsville to Brampton…and I was always running out of stamps.

Then I discovered e-mail.  Now on my lunch I could go upstairs, type out a letter and it was there…instantaneously.  I spent many a lunchtime in the computer lab, reading and responding to friends far away…people who would write back that evening and became a lifeline during a really lonely time in my life.  Things got better.  Way better.  I cheered up, and with that, I reached out to people around me in my immediate environment.  Friends near and far crowded my life but that was okay.  That was the way I liked it.  That’s the way I like it still.

Years later, I love that I have a quiet place to write those same sort of letters.  Letters that involve complete sentences.  Letters not limited to 140 characters.  Letters that, as a writer and a blogger, I consider fundamental to helping me understand and process what is going on in my life. I live in Texas and Texas is a big state.  Most of my friends live in different cities, many of them in different countries.  E-mail is essential to me to maintaining the closest of those friendships.

I realize that this is just me, but I would need more than two hands to count the number of friends I have now because of e-mail.  There are people who I knew of when we lived in the same town, but whom I really got to know once they moved away and we started writing back and forth.  At least half of those people are people I never would have anticipated being friends with when we lived in the same city.

So what to do when e-mail gets out of control?  (Because let’s face it, e-mail can easily get out of control…) I guess the response varies by person.  Some people can cut it out all together.  I prefer to walk away, take an e-vacation and set up an auto response that says I’m away from my computer the next few days and if it’s an emergency, give me a call.

For me, e-mail is just a tool, one that I can choose to use, or choose not to use.  So I get up.  I walk away.  I bake something in the kitchen or putter around in the garden.  Everything is about balance.  I personally applaud the people who can and will give up their inbox to keep that balance in their lives. Conversely, for me as a writer, my inbox is an essential part of that balance, part of what helps me keep equilibrium. 

What do you think?  What are the merits of Facebook or Twitter versus the merits of e-mail in your world?  And what helps you keep your own tendencies towards e-addiction under control?