And how would you react if both the sender and the receiver had been you? You wrote a letter to your future self many years ago and received it while busy with your daily activities. Muhammet Akalın is a literature teacher who wants his students to experience this feeling. He asks his students to write a letter addressed to themselves 10 years from now; he sends these letters to their families once the 10 years have passed.
The letters, authored in high school, reach their original senders while some of them are serving in the military and others are taking care of their children. Noting that the authors mostly write about their future plans and desired achievements in the years to come, Akalın says, “Now I look at them; one student who once wanted to become a pharmacist is now a teacher and another who wanted to become an engineer is now a psychologist.”
Ahmet Yasin Yılmaz, who was a high school student 10 years ago in the Rize Şahika Educational Institutes, wrote: “My dear life comrade; I am writing this letter from the second desk of Classroom 9/B at Şahika High School. I would be very happy if you receive this letter 10 years from now. I do not know now what I am doing or if I am really alive.” A teacher now, Yılmaz called his teacher, Akalın, as soon as he read the letter. Another student, Mehmet Terzi, warned himself 10 years ago: “I will not forgive you if you forget your past or change.”
Terzi, reading the lines he wrote a decade ago, says: “My letter started as follows: ‘You are 15 now. This is it. The rest of the letter does not matter at all’.” Another student Akalın reached was sent his letter while he was on night watch during his military service. Oğuzhan Küçük, while on night watch, told him: “Believe me, I was thinking last night about whether you would send those letters. And now you’ve called. I remember that moment like yesterday and it has been 10 years.”
Recalling that his goal was to make sure that his students realized what time contributes and takes away from life, Akalın explains the stories of the letters as follows: “Each student gave me their mailing address and contact information, including phone numbers, along with their letters. When the time came, I called them to confirm their addresses. At the beginning, I reached out to nearly 25 students. The news that I was sending the letters spread among them. Some called me to give their addresses themselves.” Akalın has mailed out the letters of 35 students out of 48. He has conducted this exercise with three different groups of students. He was inspired to provide such an opportunity for his students to reflect on their past accomplishments and failures by Turgut Özal, who initiated the first project of sending letters to the future in Turkey in 1988.
