Writing | Social Media

How Your Heart May Change Someone’s Life with Your Email Closing

Two strangers disrupt writing retreat with astonishing quotes

Starbucks Writing Retreat, Rancho Palos Verdes, CA

I carry my Misto grande (half coffee, half steamed milk, 5 honey packets) to the outside area and set it on the ledge of a fire pit, overlooking the ocean gleaming pure white at the horizon. I am about to do research, re-writing, and editing on an article, and have set aside this day where no one will disturb me.

I have chosen to write on a light subject, closing greetings — salutations — for emails, when I usually write about subjects that grab the guts — guilt, shame, sexual assault, separated children of asylum seekers — subjects I (and I believe others) need to learn about. But it’s been a serious week of impeachment hearings, and I am in serious denial about news that there will be some cowboys in space — not exactly there to plan strategies for planetary peace. I open my laptop.

The writer is interrupted

A tall woman with blonde hair, wrapped in a puffy jacket and pink scarf approaches.

“Is anyone sitting here?”

“You,” I answer. When people have said this to me it makes me feel welcome. She smiles and sits down. Alongside her, another woman with a navy-blue coat, and dark hair, sits down.

After a little chatting, the woman beside me turns to me and says, “What do you think of the quote, “‘…be swift to hear, slow to speak…’”?

A lavender mountain in the distance of my mind suspects she has an agenda. But I’m a social worker and know that listening is the rarest and most precious gift people can give each other. I tell her some version of that in a friendly way because I like to connect with strangers, even if only for a moment when I’m trying to write.

The writer is interrupted again

Turning back to my laptop, googling “greetings” I hear her ask, “What do you think of this one, ‘In showing honor to one another, take the lead.’”

The lavender mountain is now at the forefront of my mind, certain my neighbor wants to share Bible verses, probably because it’s the most important thing in her life. She has this curious way of engaging.

The writer engages

I turn away from my lap-top, towards her friendly, large face. “I have a forthcoming book called ‘Treasured,’” I tell her, “about ways to deeply take in sincere compliments from others, and ways to honor others that can change their lives.” I don’t tell her that even though I honor others often, due to wounding from the past, leading to polarities in me of absolute trusting and distrusting. I often peek back at someone’s email closing before I decide what closing to write back to them. I sip my Misto.

The part of me that is easily distracted tells her that I am writing about greetings at the end of emails. The woman nods with interest. I mention to her, and somewhat to the woman beside her, that deciding what greeting to use was easy when I was seven. Then I was in awe of my sister Sharon, four years older than me and far away in a mysterious Poconos mountains Camp Ramah, who wrote home weekly on fold-up cards she signed, “Bye for now.”

“I used ‘Bye for now’ for years,” I tell them, “when I wrote obligatory letters from summer camp, or later in my 20’s when I wrote from yoga camp.”

The woman beside me laughs. “Those trite greetings from letters from summer camp.” She nods her head. While they were trite, and I’m nodding my head a little, I’m a bit jarred as there was and still is something holy about Sharon and her letters.

Are these strangers helping the writer with ideas?

I turn to the smiling woman, I turn to my laptop. To write or not to write, that is the question.

Sipping our drinks, we chat about greetings. “‘Warm Regards,’” woman number two tells me, “is what was commonly used in New Zealand when I lived there. Or just, ‘Regards.’”

“That feels a bit formal for me,” I tell her.

“All my best,” the woman to my right mentions. “Or ‘Best.’”

“That sounds a bit phony to me. Does the person care that much?”

Thirty-five minutes into our discussion we introduce ourselves. Terri is the warm woman beside me. Shelly, the now more talkative woman to her right. I ask if I can read them the article I’ve been writing (and trying to research and edit).

“Yes!” Terri says.

The two women stand behind me looking over my shoulder. I read the article aloud and then they read along with me the list of symbols and new greetings that I’ve enjoyed making up, taking off from XO into uncharted territories. I tell them I will probably never send these greetings, but secretly fantasize that one will come into common usage.

Terri and Shelly laugh at one or the other, and I tell Terri that I’m surprised that she laughed at number 6.

The strangers’ words percolate in writer

Preparing to leave, Terri asks me to send her the completed article and assures me she will send me the chapters and verses of the passages she has quoted to me. “Be swift to hear, slow to speak.”

This passage has been percolating in me like the coffee brewing inside. I am brought to my beans, remembering that in writing emails and their closing salutations it is important to listen and respond to the other’s email — something I skimp on, busy and full with what I want to say — busy with myself. I want to matter, they want to matter.

“In showing honor to one another, take the lead,” the second quote Terri has presented, calls to some part of my soul. It is important to honor the person first — it might make their day, or moment, or life, and it might soothe them midst some heart-ache, or overwhelm in life. Who knows what pain or process might be drizzling or pouring on the land they are stepping across, as they read my email and its closing regards for them.

Man makes plans, God laughs

I didn’t plan on my day’s research coming in the form of two strangers at Starbucks, who, while we drink Misto and Lattes, may have Biblical designs on me. I hadn’t planned to end like this, with their ideas (albeit from the Bible) and not mine. I wanted the article to sound like me. I have plenty of ideas and don’t need prompts from others.

But are Terri and Shelly, bundled in coats beside me, some sort of angels, not ones whose message is read for 5,780 years who announce generations to come like the three angels who visited Abraham and Sarah foretelling that Sarah would give birth, at which Sarah had laughed in disbelief.

Every day angels

But are they every day kinds of angels, sent to remind me that despite my previous, oft clever, eight sections about writing congruent email greetings, the intention can be simpler: less mind, more heart. It has been said that the longest journey is from the head to the heart. As Mike Murphy blogged, “This is because the heart is where love lives… The heart brings us back into balance, creating congruency in our lives.” Can you or I find the GPS within to make this journey?

The writer sets aside her plan and her lap-top

I reflect on the two quotes: focusing on listening and being the first to honor. For the article, I like that there are only two points to remember. They can stick with me and with people reading. I feel compelled to set aside the light article I have worked on for over a month.

The ocean is now shivering and so am I. Terri and Shelly say good-bye (and likely pray for me). I walk inside the busiest Starbucks in the west and search for and find a foot on a wooden counter for my lap-top and me. Sensitized by reflection on the verses — or is it by my Misto — the thought occurs to me as I am about to open my lap-top: When you open your laptop (or iPad, tablet or phone) do you enter the roaring, attracting wavelengths of cultural conformity or do you bring your meditative awareness to the world?

If you want to receive a heart-changing email from author write to Claudia S. Gold: [email protected]. Graphic “Email Greetings V. 20” was designed by Erika Web Genie Wilmore, FempireDigital.com, ErikaWilmore.com.