An Intense, Urgent, Truthful, Alive Conversation - Episode 265
A friend once pointed out to us that conversations sometimes - often even - 'die in the middle' without anyone paying any attention to it happening. And sometimes conversations are robbed of their aliveness by our very wish that they go well, and our trying to fall back on a method in order to bring that about.
So that has us wondering together who we each have to be in order that our conversations are genuine, intense, urgent, truthful and alive - in whatever context... It's the central question that animates the existence of this 'Turning Towards Life' project and practice.
This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Here's our source for this week:
Are We There Or Not?
One of the main symptoms of a bad conversation is this: one of the participants is on autopilot.
Imagine you're on a date. Feeling insecure, you've brought along a set of index cards. You know: "7pm Inquire re childhood memories", "7.15pm Praise her outfit"... We really want the date to go well. But every time we glance down at our index cards, this is felt by our date as disengagement. And she's right: we're leaving her out of the process. Our anxiety has made us crave a method, when what the situation demanded was some moment-to-moment responsiveness to what was actually happening (to the true energy of the conversation) ... We prepare those cards and bring them along and keep awkwardly consulting them when we should be looking deeply into our date's eyes, because we don't believe that, devoid of a plan, we have enough to offer ...
Some conversations feel evasive, ill-considered, agenda-laced, selfish; others feel intense, urgent, generous, truthful. What's the difference? Well, I'd say it's presence. Are we there or not? Is the person across the table there (to us), or not?
George Saunders
Afterword #3 on 'The Darling', from 'A Swim In the Pond In the Rain', p161-162
Photo by Sunguk Kim on Unsplash