C is for conversation, curiosity, caring, community
Life’s meaning emerges from conversation in community with people you love. – Dave Pollard
I will have real conversations in 2008, fierce conversations driven by curiosity, by caring, by connection, in community, through love.
“I found myself unwilling to waste time. I cut right through the bullshit to the real conversation,” MaryAnne said yesterday, recalling the last few weeks when she was standing on the edge of this world, going into the next. Now back to the realm of the living in a delightful respite, she knows she is still dying (as are we all), but has been given some more time—“to do what?,” she is asking. Perhaps to record her thoughts of being in that liminal space between life and death—the gap between I am and I was and I am becoming; she has asked me to help her by asking questions, recording our conversations, creating organizing principles for the lessons we are all learning from her—and from ourselves, delving into her heart-filled community to uncover what has made it so possible for friends and family to walk toward her and not away from her at what we usually see as a very fearful time. Perhaps we can all learn from her as we learned from her daughter’s death just over a year ago.
Talking with her yesterday reminded me of something Andre Gide once said: "The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say—because they were too obvious." As I heard her talk of giving and receiving what seemed to be last rites, those final conversations with friends in which you say the things that you cannot seem to say, day to day, I wondered why we don’t say those things every day. I wondered what our lives would look like if we did.
Dave Pollard has written beautifully and brilliantly about having better conversations. He also writes that “Every conversation has a purpose—which may be to give attention to learn something new, to understand something better, to convey an important idea or an imagined possibility, to express love and appreciation, to collaborate, or to build community through consensus or exchange.” Do we know the purpose of our conversations, I wonder. Often not, I fear. Or we say the conversation is about conveying idea when it is really about forcing someone to agree with us. We say the conversation is about expressing appreciation when it is really about creating a debt. We say the conversation is about understanding when it is really about judging. We say the conversation is to connect, but it is really about standing above.
“When there is love,” he says, “conversation has purpose, context, engagement, trust (while, without love, conversation is sterile and selfish). The best conversations are in fact a form of play. Good conversation entails listening and paying attention, and it is through this that we learn (unschooled), discover, develop capacity to understand how the world works and how to make it better.”
Dave is right. And yet, as Margaret Miller said, “Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of witnesses.” Most of us are so adept at turning every conversation back to us. We ask question less from curiosity than from an addictive need to find our place in their story.
And most of us stay at the level of weather reports, forgetting what Oscar Wilde warned: "Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” And yet we stay there, on that surface place, not going into the conversation, the real ones. Why? Fear? Fear of what? That you will know too much? That you will misunderstand? That you will read too much into what I am saying?
An acquaintance—not a friend, really, but someone I had seen once a year for several years—knocked on my dorm room door one evening one summer and talked for five hours about what was really going on in his life. I was the container for what he needed to say. Perhaps I was at a sufficient distance to hear him since we weren’t close friends. He spoke of lost and broken love, disappointments, and of having been suicidal. I was his witness, the holder of his story. The next year when we came back to the same gathering place, he couldn’t look at me, be with me, talk to me. Did he feel he had revealed too much? Did he feel he had said things he shouldn’t have said?
I’ve felt that way. Have you? What drives us to silence instead of vulnerability and connection? After all, as Mister Rogers told us, “Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.” Who are you helping know they are not alone? Who is helping you know that?
Slacker Manager beautifully summarizes a book I read several years ago: Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott. The key points? (My emphasis and additions in bold and italics)
Three ideas:
- Conversations with people are either bolstering relationships, reducing relationships, or keeping relationships at status quo. Keith Johnstone’s brilliant book, Impro, includes a fascinating section on how in our every interaction we are either giving or receiving status.
- Muster the courage to interrogate reality. When you ask your teenager what they think about global warming and they say “I don’t know,” ask them what they would think if they did know.
The talented and wacky Truman Capote once said “A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue.” Indeed. But oh how often it is the sound of one voice talking.
Intentions: In 2008, I will find my life’s meaning not in my bank account or awards or commendations, but in conversation in community with people I love. I will be fully present. I will see conversation as relationship. I will go into fierce conversations, not avoid them. I will say what I believe is obvious, because it sometimes isn’t and if I don’t, someday it will be too late. And I will remember that as Richard Armour once said, “it is all right to hold a conversation but you should let go of it now and then.”
Subtle, subliminal message: If you’ve enjoyed this essay, perhaps you’d also enjoy my upcoming book, LIFE IS A VERB, to be published by Globe Pequot Press in the fall of 2008. For more info, click here!
