Psych-Out

“Conversation has to explore new territory to become an adventure.”
Theodore Zeldin, Conversation

A great conversation casts a spell.  You know the kind of conversation.  Where time disappears.  There’s no place else you’d rather be.  Like a great meal, it fills us.  Like an aphrodisiac, it excites us. Through the interweaving of words, thoughts, and ideas, something within us changes.

The Bean Feast, Jan Steen

A great conversation is improvisational.  It strikes as if out of nowhere:  often late at night; or, within the soft flickering glow of candlelight; or, woven within the tastes, textures, and scents of that great meal.

I found myself in one of those conversations, in a dining car on a train from Ann Arbor to Albuquerque.  We were an unlikely quartet of strangers tossed together by the train’s 7:30 dinner seating schedule –  an elderly couple from Oregon who’d never before left their state; a tattooed, face-pierced death metal avenger with a Morbid Angel t-shirt; and, me.

Our table talk twisted and turned across the dusky cornfields of Iowa over two bottles of wine.  No expectations of a future, and no shared baggage from  the past, the four of us laughed heartily at life, at ourselves, while wondering aloud about each other.  There was an ever present curiosity about our divergent philosophies and life experiences peppered with musings about the likes of Ozzie Osborne, Sinatra, Led Zepplin, and Elvis.

Opening scene:  Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train

Great conversations are filled with the unexpected.

Theodore Zeldon in his book Conversation writes, “conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don’t just exchange facts:  they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought.  Conversation doesn’t just reshuffle the cards; it creates new cards.”

There are plenty of books that teach the how-to’s of conversation.  Like trying to follow a manual on how to make love, however, you’ll fail without the right spirit and mood.   You can’t coax that great conversation without a sense of safety, mutual respect, acceptance, and curiosity.  And, according to Zeldon, what matters most is courage.  Courage to speak one’s mind.  Courage to be open to new ideas, and new ways of thinking.   Courage to acknowledge differences.  Courage to listen.

My Dinner with Andre, by Louis Malle

These truths hold for friends, co-workers, spouses, lovers, parents and their children. How many dinner times turn miserable because of iron-fisted commands about what is and isn’t acceptable to say, think, and feel?  How many relationships start to falter for fear of letting slip, or just hearing, those private, yet exciting little thoughts that slide against the grain of convention?

Conversation flourishes when the table is set as a safe place to make discoveries about the world, to discuss them, and digest them.  And, when there’s no cause for fear.

You want to open the possibility for more talk in your life? Loosen the reigns.  Keep at bay your fears of what you might say, or what you might hear.  Nurture the qualities of spirit and mind that make for great conversation –

well-informed, sympathetic, interested in life, moderate in response, curious about differences in life experiences;  be attentive, good humored, have a sense of proportion, don’t preach, don’t take yourself too seriously, don’t be argumentative; be original, broad-minded, charitable, unselfish, considerate, flexible, poised, enthusiastic, and, don’t forget, always a trifle whimsical.

Dangling Conversation, Simon and Garfunkel (Youtube by Starlightmoonflower)