Bestselling author Ann Patchett doesn't own a smartphone. "The few flip phones I've had in my life died ignoble, uncharged deaths in the backs of dresser drawers," she writes in an essay about regret at the New York Times. But it's not the lack of cellphone she laments. It's signing up for email. Believing cellphones were "a means of making a person trackable," Patchett took more kindly to email, seeing it as an extension of letter mail, "the chance for more friends, more love, more work." And it is that. "The connection it provides here in Tennessee, where I live, far away from many of the people I feel closest to, stands in place of conversation," Patchett writes. But she often feels she's neglected those right in front of her.
"I regret how susceptible I am to [email's] constant interruptions," she writes. "I regret all the times I look, only to find there's nothing there. I regret the minutes it takes for my attention to fully return to other work at hand after stopping to check." Indeed, emails "keep on coming" and "I can't go to sleep with them sitting there," Patchett writes, adding that, "despite everything I know, I can never stop believing that answering email is a task that can be completed, instead of a river that will forever be raging forward." Now the before times have taken on a rosy glow, Patchett writes. "There were so many hours in every day and so few ways to spend them" that the author spent most days writing stories and most evenings staring at the stars. "I miss that darkness," she writes, "the feeling of a wide expanse of empty time in which to wander." Read the full piece here. (More email stories.)
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