S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 2 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 1 6 2 5 Sharon Lauricella 3 What Happened? 3.1 Recipients From 4 December, 2015 to 30 April, 2016, I wrote 148 acknowledgement letters – exactly the number of days in the approximate five-month period. After completing this iteration of the project, I quantified the proportion of recipients. The majority of recipients of my acknowledgements were students, at 61% of the whole (39% current students and 22% former students). Almost 20% were friends, 7% people I had never met face-to-face (in this case, academic professionals), 7% were colleagues, and a small proportion of individuals such as business owners/employees, parents of students, a teacher, a neighbour, and one family member. Figure 3 shows the categories of recipients, together with the percent in this project. Figure 3. Recipients of acknowledgement Recipient Number Percent Current student 58 39% Former student 32 22% Friend (yoga) 18 12% Friend (high school, university, through family) 11 7% Never met (Twitter contacts, academics) 11 7% Colleague 10 7% Businesses (local auto repair shop, local ice cream shop, local eye doctor) 3 2% Parent of current student 2 1% Teacher at child’s school 1 1% Neighbour 1 1% Family 1 1% 3.2 Responses More than half of the people who I acknowledged responded to my letter: 61% (90 of 148) contacted me either by Facebook messenger, text, email, with a letter in response, or face-to-face. I suspect that many people contacted me via Facebook messenger because it was the medium by which I initiated contact by asking for a postal address. Facebook messenger is also the second most popular mobile messaging app, with over 900 million users per month at April, 2016 (Statista 2016), indicating the ubiquity of its services. Further, I received four handwritten letters, 20 text messages, and 14 emails. The depth of responses that I received to my acknowledgement letters was nothing short of remarkable. For example, a former student, Meghan, framed the mounted quote that I sent her and displayed it in her apartment, and also mailed to me a card that she had made herself. She wrote that reaching out to her with the letter and quote “meant the world” to her. A current student, Priyana, was in tears when she thanked me face-to-face for the letter that I had written to her. On her graduation day, just a week prior to writing this manuscript, I met her parents. They, too, thanked me for the letter that I had written to their daughter. Priyana’s father wept as I recounted how impressed I am with his youngest child; he had to excuse himself and reorient in order to continue the conversation. In April, I sent a letter to a fellow academic with whom I had connected via Twitter. Though I hadn’t met him face-to-face, I wanted to acknowledge his kindness in supporting my Twitter account. He replied via email, as I’d included my business card with his letter; in a series of email exchanges, it turned out that we have mutual friends and acquaintances, though being from different academic disciplines and geographic areas, we ourselves had never met. Perhaps my favourite outcome of this project is the relationship that I formed with Lorraine, the parent of one of my daughter’s sports teammates. Lorraine and her husband Ron express a wonderful relationship in which they are jovial, loving, and frequently open their home to others. Given that I was (and I am still) going through a challenging divorce, I found the relationship that Lorraine and Ron share particularly inspiring. Initially, I experienced moments of envy – while this is Ron’s second marriage, and Lorraine’s first, I wondered if I would ever find such happiness as they por-
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