Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

by Stephen Starring Grant

Patriotism is not an old-fashioned value, but rather an old value, a foundational one. It is the virtue of critical loyalty, the ability to feel deep affection for one’s country and a simultaneous willingness to critique its failures.

Both things were true. That’s the whole point of prayer. It’s not that God looks down and grants your wish. Your prayer is an intention to undertake what is required, to do all the work that follows. To make it true.

When I got to the office, I said one of my oldest mantras. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. I wasn’t going to let myself feel time-pressured. I would follow my checklist, be deliberate, and execute step by step. Plan your work and work your plan.

Millionaire mailmen are not a myth, just hardworking people who put their money to work for themselves in the capital markets.

What carrying the mail taught me is that modern life has made us strangely weak in many ways. Weak memories for space, for numbers, for language. Our bodies are capable of walking tens of miles every day, of memorizing every fold of huge territories, of tolerating great heat and great cold, yet in our modern life all these capabilities are latent. When I think about the way that carrying the mail changed me, I wonder how much of it was tapping into this different experience of being human.

Sometimes winning is the act of not losing. But there was more than that here. I was being shown something: all that was required of me was not quitting.

Being great hadn’t led me to my essential selfhood. Sucking did.

As the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 reads, the USPS has “the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people.”

In psychologist Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl says that even when everything has been taken from you, you can choose your attitude: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

To be present in time, in your own body, your spirit intact, your selfhood whole, it is a gift—and it will not last.

The universe was not only vast, it was indifferent. I was just a single mind afloat in it, a piece of sentient, terrified flotsam in a cosmic foam of white water, reality nothing more than a computer that was calculating itself, from quantum moment to quantum moment.