July 12, 2022

Dear One,

         Every day, the world will try to take your sensitivity from you. It will design 24-hour news cycles to provide you with moment-to-moment updates on the new atrocities it has conjured up, new suffering for you to absorb. It will assault you with an endless stream of meaningless content and a fire hose of other people's thoughts, opinions, beliefs, fears, and anger.

         As the world grows bigger and louder and meaner, it will not seek to accommodate your sensitivity, which could serve as a wayfinder for other souls. Instead, it will expect you to adjust, acclimate, desensitize.  And if you cannot do that, it will lay at your feet a spectacular array of numbing agents from which to choose. It will tell you repeatedly—but implicitly and explicitly—that you need to toughen up.

         You must never do this. You must never allow the world to make a liability of your most precious and powerful resource. You must never let it wrest from you that which is uniquely, exquisitely yours.

         Protect your sensitivity as though it were a small child or a helpless animal. Build a fence out of gentleness and time and stillness and erect it around your sensitivity like they do for young saplings until they're big enough to fend for themselves. Except this will not happen to your sensitivity because it will always be tender and vulnerable and you will have to maintain the fence forever.

         Be assured that you will meet other people along the way who have built fences similar to yours. They will be the ones to gleefully, and with much appreciation and mutual recognition, help you safeguard what's inside.

Love,

J

Photo attribution for article: Lea Redmond’s World’s Smallest Post Service.