The joy of an unexpected message

I received two unexpected messages this week.  I’m not sure if the sender in either case intended them to be particularly sentimental but the surprise and delight at a small gesture of thoughtfulness really got me thinking about the value of getting in touch with someone ‘just because’ and the impact that this can have.

The first was a card from my old PE teacher.  This was surprising in a number of ways – I left school twenty years ago and haven’t been in touch with this particular teacher at all since then…. and I was not particularly memorable from a PE perspective, so I was quite surprised that she had remembered me at all.  Her message said that she had bought her daughter one of our water bottles for her 21^st birthday and that she had loved it.  She said that she’d followed the progress of Wrendale over the years and was very proud of what I’d achieved.  There is something extremely comforting about the knowledge that you have someone supporting you quietly in the background wishing you well and I was deeply touched by her message.

The second was a little card from a customer who had written to us at Wrendale to tell us how much he enjoys sending our cards to his family and just wanted to let us know how much they mean to him.  We receive so many lovely and heartfelt messages from customers and it never ceases to amaze me that some people are so nice that they take the time to say thank you and tell us what our products mean to them.  We put our heart and soul into everything we do and every single one of these messages means the world to us.  

I received that little card the day before mother’s day.  Mother’s day is often a sad occasion for so many and I always find it bittersweet celebrating the day with my children when I miss my own mum so much.  The little bit of joy I felt opening that card when I was feeling sad really did give me a huge lift.

I’ve always been a lover of cards and stationery in general (the thrill of starting a new notebook deserves it’s own post!) and this was a good reminder of how important these small gestures are, especially at the moment when we’re all going through such difficult times.  You never know how your letter might find someone, and how much of a difference it could make, so I have paid these lovely acts of kindness forward and I hope that I have managed to bring a smile to someone’s face in the way that those unexpected messages did to mine.