Time to Write a Message in a Bottle

And throw it into the sea of your life's stories...

Yesterday, I wrote a letter to an old friend who I had let slip away.

I felt an impulse to create some clarity, share some observations, maybe explain a few things, but it turned out all I really wanted to say was: I couldn't forgive her, and I loved her.

As I was writing, something unexpected happened: the story of our 40+ years of friendship started to wriggle under my pen. While I was focusing on how to express my thoughts and feelings, trying to tell the story, in a sneaky and quite unintented way the meaning of my words changed. It occurred to me that this friendship might not have been what I thought it was. Puzzle pieces falling into place, I suddenly felt I could see a considerably bigger picture, one that had been hidden from my sight until then. One that felt strangely right. One that I knew would liberate me.

Quite unintentionally, the clarity I had wanted to bring to the story of this broken relationship did happen to me.

Writing, I had entered a state of witnessing my self gaining a different perspective on a part of my life that had been painful, disturbing and somehow lost in time.

Also, I won't send the letter.

The text will be part of an archive of messages that needed to be written but not sent: I no longer believe the adressee might be willing or able to deal with it now, or maybe ever. But, at the same time, I don't want to abandon my words and the act of sending of my message either.

This is exactly what nature intended when she created the genre of Message In A Bottle: you compose it, you send it, but you leave it to Fortuna, the fates, the sea nymphs to deliver it.

You essentially pour your heart and mind and soul into your letter and then… You archive it, together with your earlier efforts to clear, make sense, order, sort, sift, and gather loose ends.

I feel the whole endeavour is in a way a profoundly 60+ impulse and undertaking: people I have spent parts of my life with, close people, beloved people, and not just of the parent generation but of my generation, have died. Others are starting to age, become more fragile, enter retirement or a state of chronic illness.

Time to start clearing the clutter, weeding out the garden paths, burning the deadwood. Time to take some light into the shed and see what’s what.

It's what some psychologists call ‘Gestaltschliessung’: the feeling of closure that comes with having intentionally worked through a Gestalt (a complex symbol, a metaphor or a narrative) of your life.

Plus, the act of writing is epistemic: it can produce more insights than you thought you had and intended to create.

Time to write some messages and put them in a bottle and surrender them to the sea of stories we all share.

Time to find some peace.

This is writing for resilience.