Yesterday I said that I’d write a word vomit about having good conversations. It’s a good idea to do what I say I’ll do, so I’ll do that now.
Conversations. What are they, really? They’re a process by which people exchange information.
But that’s somehow an incomplete definition– we can all describe situations in which we exchanged information with people, yet didn’t feel like we were having a conversation. What are these?
The first example that comes to mind is a transactional conversation, that you might have when you’re buying something at a grocery store. Will you be paying by cash or credit card? That’s not a conversation. If you see the lady regularly, and she asks you some casual social questions– “I haven’t seen your mother lately, how is she?”– then it becomes a polite social exhange of sorts, but it’s still not _really_ a conversation.
I’m talking about really, really good conversation. The kind that really opens you up, that makes you feel like you’re a part of something greater than yourself, something that you surrender to.
Of course not every single conversation needs to be like this– and expecting a conversation to be somehow profound or grand is usually a great way to prevent it from happening. The most you can really do, it sometimes seems, is to get all the conditions as right as possible, and then just allow it to happen.
But allow what, exactly? People aren’t JUST exchanging raw information in a really good conversation. They’re communicating more than just words, more than just data. The commitment to the process itself communicates something. We should list those things out. What are the things we communicate through good conversation, that we may not necessarily verbalize?
“You are important to me in this moment. I care about what you think. Your opinion matters. Your pain is real. I want to know what’s on your mind. I want to know what’s going on in your life. I want to know exactly how you’re feeling. I want you to feel comfortable.”
Verbalizing these things can be a little cheesy if your ‘defenses’ are up– nobody is really going to say these things at an office lunch. They’re typically things we talk about when it’s late at night, when we’re illuminated by soft lights, maybe we’ve had a little bit to drink, and we’re tired but choosing to spend time with each other anyway– that’s when we allow ourselves to talk about childhood dreams, old yearnings, failed relationships, disappointments, anxieties, guilt, shame.
I have very different conversations with my boss when we’re sitting beside each other at work, when we’re having a 1-1 review in a meeting room, when we’re walking down to buy lunch immediately afterwards, and when we’re walking towards the train station together after work, or when we’re eating and/or drinking at night. They’re all conversations – because we trust each other enough to be honest with each other. But we also both have multiple hats and masks to wear, and multiple contexts to wear them in, and there are appropriate times to have these conversations.
Even “appropriate times to have these conversations” feels like a slightly odd statement. Different things arise in different contexts.
It’s the same with my wife. We have conversations as best friends, as co-owners of a 30-year mortgage, as housemates sharing the same living space. We have different conversations over lunch or dinner when we’re eating at home, or when we’re eating out nearby, or when we pay good money to have a dinner-date somewhere luxurious. Even our shared silences have very different meanings– right now when I’m writing this and she’s reading a book and we’re listening to soft piano music and we’re sitting on the sofa. Certainly very different when she’s getting up in the morning and I’m rushing to leave for work, and different from when we’re both mindlessly internet surfing late at night, avoiding sleep for some reason or other.
What about with friends? I have some really old friends that I care about, yet it seems like the conversations we have typically follow the same cycles and patterns. It’s almost like we’re following a script, very closely. And the fact that we do that does communicate something. Maybe what we seek in each other is familiarity, nostalgia, a whiff of the past. But there’s something odd about that sort of preservation. Art should be alive, not entombed in a museum. Preservation is a sort of death.
And then I have people in my life that I don’t actually spend a lot of time with, that I might not even meet very much, but I have really good conversations with– maybe precisely because we don’t know each other all that well, and we aren’t intertwined in each other’s social circles. We can give each other frank and honest feedback about things, and it’s refreshing. We can gossip openly about our peers and loved ones, confidently knowing that the other genuinely has no conflict of interest–they don’t even know who we’re talking about anyway.
I think this is pretty common on the Internet- sometimes there are really heartfelt conversations on Reddit, between strangers who don’t really know very much about each other. That always gives me hope, the idea that there are people who care about other people without knowing very much about them apart from the fact that they’re people too.
Sometimes it certainly seems that our relationships with people keep us from seeing them as people. We cry for and empathize with characters on television, and yet we don’t quite extend the same degree of empathy for the constants in our lives– not nearly as much, not always. We treat family and friends with some fear, some trepidation. Maybe it’s because we have too much history. They know too much about us. They might laugh at us if we told them the truth. They might stare at us weirdly if we asked them unusual questions. They know precisely where to stab us to make it really hurt.
So we hide. We use scripts. Anything to avoid the unpleasant discomfort of having to face up to all the glorious mess of extended human relations. God, we’ve got responsibilities and obligations and bills and– who has time to sit and open up, especially with people who might judge us for it, who might’ve already diagnosed us, made up their minds about who we are, what our problems are, what we need, and so on?
People grow and change all the time, at every single moment. But somehow it’s easier to be our now-selves with strangers that we’ve just met, assuming there’s a twinkle in their eyes that tells you they’re curious, they’re dying for some authenticity and truth. We can afford to be a little crazier, a little truer to our current selves.
They haven’t had time to decide who we are yet. In this moment, we can be anything, and we are free.