Honouring conversations

There is something spectacularly special about a good conversation. It has the power to nurture us, spark creativity and drive our motivation for change. A good conversation is, at its simplest, just so damn enjoyable. I love them. I thrive off them. They energise me. Inspire me. Bring delight. Laughter. Tears. I can carry them for days. They can carry me for days. A good conversation can lodge in your soul, building the essence of who you are and who you will become.

I have decided there aren’t enough adjectives in this world for me to describe how I feel about conversations and the joy they bring me. I was reminded of their beauty, their essential nature and the depth of what they do for us, at the end of a long phone conversation with a dear friend tonight. Our conversation meandered like a wonderful directionless walk in nature from one topic to another, bouncing off each other changing the direction of the path, and finding a clearing, a ridge or a ravine, or perhaps a special tree or riverbank to pause and percolate each topic. Work, family, meditation, adventure, philosophy, writing, community and archetypes. Two writers chewing the fat about all the things that light up our souls.

The last destination in our conversational journey was about the importance of dialogue. The life that a conversation affords a piece of writing. We agreed on the value of taking the time to engage in conversations online with other people’s and each other’s writing. Whether it be a short form Instagram post or Tweet, or a longer form blog post, poem or essay. If everyone is talking at once and talking at each other, what does that achieve? The beauty is when you comment, acknowledge, question, discuss online (or offline) continuing the conversation the writer has started. That is how you build connection, community and the collective.

We are creatures of conversation. Conversations are at the very core of our being. A good old yarn by the fire with friends bonds our spirits, as it has for time past for an eternity. Meal time conversation build the character of families, friends as a community and as individuals. Some of my most treasured memories are the dinner or breakfast table conversations with my family, laughing at Dad’s jokes; and my imagination and understanding of the world, and where and how we all fit in, expanding as my parents and my older siblings shared their trials, tribulations and trophies of the day just been or about to start. My heart would swell over a sad tale, and equally so, of those filled with joy and a seemingly happy ending (or beginning). Questions were always welcomed at our table. They were a staple like the salt and pepper at the centre of the setting. They were expected and could be used as liberally as we wanted to enhance a conversation or spice it up. When those meal time conversations extended to include my elderly godparents, when we visited and a feast was prepared for all to enjoy; or with my grandparents during holidays, even though the children couldn’t understand most of the conversation (as it was in Lithuanian and no one had taught us) we loved it. We simply got caught up in the rhythm of the conversation. In the dance of the sounds. The laughter. The gasps. The exchanges. We deliciously enjoyed the musical sounds of their words and the chaos of everyone speaking all at once but yet, without interference, and in harmony. Their words merging together, almost like they became one being breathing in and out through the dialogue, which connected them. And I remember, when they played cards, the conversation became ever so more intriguing and mesmerising, regardless of what was being said. It was the pauses in the conversations, which held my attention. The anticipation of what would be said next and where the conversation would move.

A relationship is built on conversations. One of the only early risers in a family of those who loved to sleep in, I had so many special breakfasts with my grandfather when we visited. He would make me his special signature fried egg dish, the ‘cheeseburger’ made of a buttery cooked egg on toast with cheese in between, the cheese melting under the heat of the hot egg. It was as scrumptious as the conversations I had sitting at the Laminex kitchen table opposite my grandfather, my little legs swinging under the chair as we talked, and talked and talked.

I also spent hours upon hours sitting on my parents bedroom floor, the phone to my ear in their bedroom talking endlessly to my best friend. My Dad increasingly becoming frustrated as the night wore on, worried that no one would be able to get through if they needed to and that I was ‘holding up the line’. He would ask me ‘What on earth do you two have to talk about?’ A valid question given we had spent all day at school together, and hung out afterwards, riding our bikes. But there was always more to talk about. Always more to unpack, discover, gossip and work out.

Early on in our relationship, my husband and I talked into the early hours of the morning on the phone when we first met. Our conversation has lasted over two decades, over a quarter of a century, and continues every day. Our conversation feeds our love for each other. Our connection. And now we have our own children, the next generation of meal time conversationalists.

Conversations are what connect us. Deeply connect us. The first prototype of the internet was originally designed for computers to be able to communicate on the one platform. It quickly evolved to a platform for human conversations, which transcended global distances of land and sea. Conversations are the fascia of the internet, the sinewy web of dialogue, which keeps it moving. And when isolation hit, where did we go? We picked up our conversations where we left off, almost not missing a beat, onto online platforms like Zoom, FaceTime, Messenger, What’s App and dare I say it, House Party. We connected in conversation, sitting by the firelight, our simultaneous fire pits crackling in unison across the bandwidth in each of our back yards.

Conversations are boundless. We constantly talk to ourselves, those inner conversations guiding us through life. And we constantly talk to our ancestors, who walked before us and now who walk beside us in life. At its most literal, we talk to them in our dreams, in our hearts and imagination. At its most surreal, we talk to them through our bodies in the trauma we carry, or the bliss we feel unexpectedly.

I would invite you to keep the conversation going, but no one needs an invitation. We willingly and instinctively love to chat. Whether it is the ilk of Platonic or Socratic dialogues, or simply ‘solving the problems of the world’ with a friend over a cup of tea, our conversations shape our perception of the world, how we think and how we feel. It also shapes our journey, the decisions we make and the conversations we have with the earth and our destiny.

The conversation never ends. It is an essential part of being alive. It feeds our longing to connect and belong. Our desire to learn and grow. Our deep love of sharing. To nourish our souls.