The Art of Conversation
I love an obscure reference. I do. A personal take on something. An example or comparison that opens a window into someone else’s vision. It humanizes everything and makes the mundane that much more interesting.
And anything can become mundane without your even noticing. You answer e mails, have your second cup of coffee, check your meeting schedule, log your hours and somewhere in the midst of all that, you do the actual job part of your job and converse with a variety of people on a series of predictable topics, anticipating predictable answers, so that you can get on with the next automated activity of your day. Routines can be a wonderful thing, no doubt about it — almost musical and rhythmic and structural in a good way. But when they go south, they’re suffocating.
I was thinking about this in reference to conversation. I love conversation. “Too much,” some might say. “I don’t remember asking,” I would respond. What I mean by conversation is, humanizing a situation so that all humans feel, um, human and actually have a shared experience. Talking to rather than at. But you can’t have conversation without a genuine interest in others and without recognizing a certain value it offers. I think some people see conversation as caulifower — the vegetable that isn’t green, therefore not contributing, so why bother? Let’s just push it to the side and get on with the meat and potatoes.
But what happens, I think, when you allow for real conversation is, you get a sense of a person, and they, of you. You have a better understanding of where each other is coming from, so to speak — what colors your remarks or responses, or lack of same. And ideally you avoid the dreaded “Failure to communicate” which is a bogus, overused catch-all phrase which should more readily be translated to say “I wasn’t listening,” or “I didn’t like the answer I heard,” or “I thought you were talking to him.”
It always comes back to what you want the end result to be — do you want a certain experience to be a pleasant, collaborative exercise or a no-nonsense, do your job and get the work done effort? — and then owning your own role in the outcome. Either answer is valid. Just chose a lane and stay in it. And if, for some reason, a shadow is cast on the proceedings and the weather gets a little cloudy or downright overcast, perhaps it would be best to seek out clarity, rather than wallow in self-imposed exile and growing anger. Go right to the source and maybe have a…conversation. Just a thought. Something to ponder this election season, perhaps.
He had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.
- George Bernard Shaw
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