Dream in Heart

On the first day of school our professor introduced a new classmate—a wrinkled little old lady—to us. Her name was Rose, and she was eighty-seven years old.

After class Rose and I walked to the Student Union Building and shared a chocolate milk-shake. She told me she always dreamed of having a college education and now she was getting one. We became instant friends. Every day for the following months, we would leave class together and talk nonstop. I was always attracted, listening to this “time machine” as she shared her wisdom and experience with me.

Rose became famous and easily made friends wherever she went. She tended to be highly motivated, responsible, and deeply involved in class participation. In spare time she had someone hang out or go to bars with. She even participated in some form of athletic activity. She said that extra-curricular activities could form a vital part of her experience, creating unique chances for friendship and learning.

At the end of the term, we invited Rose to speak at our football meal. A little embarrassed, she leaned into the microphone and simply said, “I’m sorry I’m so nervous.” As we laughed, she cleared her throat and began,“We do not stop playing because we are old; we grow old because we stop playing.There is a huge difference between growing old and growing up. If you’re nineteen years old and lie in bed for one full year, you will turn twenty. If I’m eighty-seven years old and stay in bed for a year, I will turn eighty-eight. Anybody can grow older. It’s non-optional but that doesn’t take any talent or ability. The idea is to grow up by always finding the chance in change. In this way the elderly don’t have regrets for what they did, but rather for things they did not do.” Rose concluded her speech by courageously singing The Rose. She challenged us to study the words of the song and lived them out in daily lives.

At the year’s end Rose finished the college degree she had begun all those years ago. One week after graduation Rose died peacefully in her sleep. Over two thousand college students attended her funeral in honor of the wonderful woman who taught us by example that it’s never too late to be all you can possibly be.

It was 1504 Columbus was making another trip to the New World. Columbus and his men needed fresh water and food after three months at sea. They saw an island. On the island there were unfriendly Indians who did not give them food. Columbus and his men were afraid of the Indians, but he had a clever idea. He used the body language to tell the Indians about his mysterious (神秘的) power to turn off the light in the sky. He knew about a lunar eclipse (月食) the next night because the information was in his almanac (天文历书). Columbus told the Indians,“Tomorrow night I will turn off the light of the moon in the sky. ”But they did not believe him. When the eclipse (月食) began the next night, the Indians became very frightened. The Indians begged Columbus to turn on the light again, and they quickly gave him all the food and fresh water he wanted. Immediately Columbus and his men hurried back to the ship and sailed away in the moonless night.

I was the only kid in college with a reason to go to the mail box, because my mother never believed in email, in Facebook, in texting or cell phones. I was literally waiting by the mailbox to get a letter with a warmest comfort from her.

So when I moved to New York and got depressed, I did the only thing I could think of. I wrote those same kinds of letters like my mother for strangers, and tucked them all over the city: in cafes, in libraries, and even in the subway. I blogged about those letters and promised if asked for a hand-written letter, I would write one.

Overnight, my inbox became this harbor of heartbreak — a single mother in Sacramento, a girl being bullied in Kansas, a 22-year-old immigrant, all asking me to write them and give them a reason to wait by the mailbox. And this is how I initiated the act The World Needs More Love Letters.

Today I run a global organization fueled by those trips to the mailbox. It is a miracle. But the thing about these letters is that most of them have been written by people brought up in a paperless world where some best conversations happen on a screen. We have learned to diary our pain onto Facebook, and we speak swiftly in twitter.

Therefore, I’ve been carrying this mail crate (大木箱) with me these days, which is a magical icebreaker. So I get to tell total strangers about a woman whose husband was traumatized (受精神创伤) from war, and how she left love letters throughout the house saying, “Come back to me.” And a man, who had decided to take his life, slept safely with a stack of letters just beneath his pillow, handwritten by strangers who were there for him.

These stories convince me that letter-writing will never need to be about efficiency, because it is an art now, all of it: the signing, the scripting, the mailing.