Thursday 25 March 2010

Time travel

I love getting mail. More specifically I love getting snail mail: the kind that goes travels through that good (or not so) old network of post-offices and mailing centres and then lands in my mail box. There's something nostalgic about receiving 'post'.

In my post-box today was a postcard written by me, last November, when I was on a post-graduate workshop at Warwick University. It was one of our last tasks of the workshop; to write down some outcomes that we had planned to achieve within 3 months.

What was on the card is, for this audience, not relevant. What is significant is how I responded: an almost surreal feeling - it was my handwriting on the envelope (yes it came in an envelope) and on the card, but bizarrely it didn't feel like I had written those questions. And their relevance now was astounding, even just considering what I thought, back then, would be important now.

This little time-travel experience brought a smile to my face and giggle in my voice as I read the postcard. I recommend this experience as a reminder of what you've achieved by a certain time in the future. Write 3 questions to you-in-the-future, from you-as-you-are-now; seal it in a self-addressed stamped envelope and ask a friend to mail at a predetermined time in the future. A few months is enough. Then just wait for the future to happen, you needn't remember anything, except to check your post-box. I suspect it'll be a worthwhile experience for you too.