In Praise of Snailness

(My title, In Praise of Snailness, is a playful homage to the Japanese essay In Praise of Shadows.)

A friend told me that letter-writing is in favor again, and even sent me an NPR article about it. At first, I dismissed it as another nostalgia fad. Why romanticize handwritten snail-mail when messages already travel instantly? We can send words across oceans in seconds. Communication had already been solved, hadn’t it?

A few days later, during a walking group meetup, another friend pulled a plain postcard from her bag. She told me about a monthly letter-writing gathering hosted by the San Francisco public library, where people come together to make letters with paper, paint, drawings, and collage.

Then she handed me a postcard that she is working on. It was ordinary. Thick paper. Uneven handwriting. Nothing about it seemed optimized. And yet the object itself felt strangely calm. “You should join us,” she said. “You’d love it. The people there are smart and fun to be around.”

I looked at the postcard again. It could not be edited, searched, forwarded, or instantly delivered. It had no typing indicator, no read receipt, and no algorithm helping it arrive faster.

Maybe that was exactly why it felt different?

Someone had slowed down enough to make it. To choose the paper. To write by hand. To let the message take physical form. A little piece of time had been folded into the object. But doesn’t modern life worship efficiency? Messages cross oceans instantly. Groceries are dashed to your door within minutes. Packages arrive overnight. Answers appear before curiosity has time to ripen.

At Apple, one of my managers once criticized me for not using enough acronyms in conversation. “That’s Apple language,” he said. “Be optimized for efficiency. Using full words doesn’t just waste your time. It wastes other people’s time, too.” He wasn’t entirely wrong. Everywhere, speed is treated as progress. And in many ways, it works. It is astonishingly convenient.

Around the same time, I stumbled upon a documentary about the Camino de Santiago: about 500 miles walked from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain over the course of a month. The whole thing sounded irrational to me at first. A car or a train could finish it in hours. Why voluntarily spend weeks walking, especially when most people who walked were not even religious?

But the more I listened, the more I noticed something surprising. Pilgrims talked less about reaching Santiago than about what the road slowly gave back to them:

Depressed people regained confidence.
Grieving people found peace.
Burned-out people rediscovered joy.

Not because walking is magical. Because walking, like letter-writing, refuses to let you skip over presence.

A letter does not simply transmit words. It asks you to sit with another person in your mind. To choose slowly. To write by hand. To let feeling become visible. The Camino asks something similar. It asks you to stay with your own life long enough to hear it. Not all at once. Not dramatically. But step by step.

One pilgrim described the Camino, “As you walk, your feet are on the ground. It slows the pace down mentally. It stretches the time.”

“It stretches the time”!?

That line stayed with me. Modern life is always promising to save time, yet somehow we never seem to have enough of it. Books are waiting to be read, messages waiting to be answered, tasks waiting to be processed. Even silence gets filled with Spotify. Zoom meetings on the bus. Audiobooks while driving. Notifications while eating.  And on public transit, almost every face is bent to squeeze some time out from that phone.

The Camino does the opposite. So does a letter. They make waiting meaningful again. And slowly, the world returns -

Birds, wildflowers, wind, fields.
Bread, water, shade, a clean bed.
A kind stranger.
Your own thoughts.

The world becomes simpler, but not smaller. With fewer distractions, small things become large again.

Not too long after reading all this, the plane tickets were bought. Soon, my husband and I will be walking the Camino ourselves - not to conquer the miles, or collect a story, or arrive with a grand revelation. But to taste moving through the world at a pace slow enough to notice it.

And perhaps, a few handmade postcards will be sent.