The Lost Art Of Conversation
Coronavirus case counts and government mandates. The vaccine rollout, and sharing our opinions on vaccinations. Just how anxious we are to get back to normal. And just how anxious we are about interacting with other people again, in normal ways, without our masks and bubbles.
Casual conversations with strangers used to be about the weather. During small talk with acquaintances, you used to be able to learn something about them. Not usually anything too deep, but maybe an interest you have in common. And when you talked with friends, well, you’d actually catch up about life.
But over the past year, most conversations have lost their unpredictability. These days, before I open my mouth I know exactly what is going to come up in 99% of my exchanges. Of course the same things come up. They’re easy to talk about. No matter what our personal experience has been, we are all sharing the experience of living through a pandemic. And to oversimplify it all, the unbelievable amount of additional tumult from this past year.
Sometimes, I’m the person bringing it up, and sometimes I’m not. Sometimes I try to move the topic along to something else, and sometimes I’m the one keeping us stuck. We connect with each other when we find the things we have in common, and we are starved for connection. So we reach out, with all the conversation ammunition the past year has given us, and we miss each other entirely. Like ships in the night.
Hypocrisy and all, I’m certain that I’m not the only one ready to be done recycling the same four topics in our conversations. I’d love to talk to you about almost anything else instead. The thing is though, I’m not sure we’ll remember how when it comes time for us to talk about something else. We’ve forgotten how to reach out and actually connect with each other.
I never knew that unprecedented and back to normal would become cues for my brain to wander away from the present moment. It’s these phrases [and a few others] that bring my listening to a halt. My brain goes straight to my to-do list and daydreaming. I have to force myself to come back to the person in front of me, even though I usually don’t want to.
I miss the surprise in conversation. Both the mundane and exciting places an exchange with another person would take you. We are missing out on getting to know the people around us. Because we’ve forgotten how to talk to each other, about anything even slightly below the surface. We are stuck going through the motions while the art of conversation slips further from our fingertips.
Real conversation feels like a lost art these days. The kind of conversation where we slide off our pool floats and see what it feels like to get our hair wet. The kind of conversation that pulls you into the depths of another person.
Something that was commonplace suddenly feels rare and precious.
Who knew I’d ever crave small talk about the weather. And that little moment of not knowing where the temperature check might lead you.
I don’t want to see real conversation, real connection become a relic of our past.
One conversation at a time, we can move beyond today’s normal, surface topics. Topics that truthfully make us all at least a little bit anxious. We can talk about the weather, our favorite flavors of ice cream, our hobbies and interests. We can ask questions that take us deeper. Because it’s below the surface that we forge real connections. Below the surface is where we discover things about each other.
As someone I love so eloquently put it the other day, during the conversation that pulled my disjointed thoughts together: Do we really have nothing else to talk about?
