drmstream[writing]

Scott,

Thanks for stop­ping by what is gen­er­ally a quiet cor­ner of the world.

Before we can find our way into con­ver­sa­tions of sub­stance, we’ve got to have a point of view about what makes a con­ver­sa­tion sub­stan­tive. At least, that’s what I real­ized after I read your com­ment and started to form an answer. It’s one of those big “mean­ing of life” ques­tions that creep up on you.

My favorite “mean­ing of life” sur­prise ques­tion moment came in a brief respite from all-out war dur­ing a ran­corous divorce I went through in my early 30’s. I’d moved out and we were fight­ing in our old kitchen one night after I’d come to visit the kids. Want a con­ver­sa­tion of sub­stance? Those felt like they were filled with substance…the kind of strung-out epic bat­tles where lan­guage can’t cap­ture the inten­sity of your feel­ing. We’d got­ten to a quiet moment and I was sit­ting on an oak kitchen chair, wait­ing in the silence for the moment to leave the house. She looked at me and asked in a weak, pan­icked voice, “Do you think we’ll get into heaven after this?” I looked at her won­der­ing if I had heard right. “You believe heaven?” I asked. Her gaze hard­ened. “Yes. Don’t you?”

Well, no, I don’t, and cer­tainly didn’t right then when I was liv­ing my own pri­vate hell. But that was the entry to a real con­ver­sa­tion of sub­stance, one that we should have had a long time before then, and the fact that we didn’t was itself a damn­ing arti­fact of the per­sonal wreck­age we’d labored to create.

So, I want to think a lit­tle about the ques­tion of con­ver­sa­tions of sub­stance — which is a fair ques­tion — and I’ll see whether it leads to some­thing that feels like it can stand writ­ing out. I’ll ping you if I write it.

I’m piqued by your dis­tinc­tion between deep and casual con­nec­tions, and its impli­ca­tion in your frame­work of choices, as touched on in your post.

My bias is that we make effi­cient choices about our time and our emo­tional energy, and that so long as we are expe­ri­enc­ing growth in our life — an impor­tant test of emo­tional and spir­i­tual well-being — then we should look to our choices as sig­nals of what to pur­sue and what to abandon.

A super­fi­cial appli­ca­tion of that the­sis to your state­ment sug­gests that those rela­tion­ships that you have deemed casual are rela­tion­ships where you haven’t felt inclined to expend the time and emo­tional energy required to main­tain them. Years later, curios­ity breathes life into the mem­ory of the rela­tion­ships; the nat­ural curios­ity that makes us want to flesh out the con­text of our per­sonal story, and makes us aware of the mul­ti­tude of sto­ries that have inter­sected our lives as we’ve gone along.

Face­book is an inter­est­ing petri dish for test­ing the valid­ity of this premise. Get recon­nected with assorted peo­ple who you’ve crossed paths with at crit­i­cal moments in your life; tab through their pho­tos, skim their friends, share a few wall posts or e-mails; travel through time and encounter an early release of your Self; and then the energy of dis­cov­ery ebbs. Because, there’s a lot of life that’s left to live ahead, a lot of new releases of your Self that need to con­tinue to get worked on, and a lot of sto­ries that are rich and pre­cious in the moment.

Your group sounds like an inter­est­ing salon. A chal­lenge, I would imag­ine, is bring­ing together peo­ple who can keep the con­ver­sa­tion on the ground. What kind of top­ics do you select? How do you select them? And how do you man­age the meet­ings of the group?

Not only is it hard to find peo­ple to talk to, it’s hard to know what mat­ters enough to talk about.

Really enjoyed this post — thanks for link­ing to me as oth­er­wise I’d have never have found it.

The mis­take I was refer­ring to was not respect­ing, or even acknowl­edg­ing, those con­nec­tions I made through work early in my career. I just didn’t see the point. I do have con­nec­tions with friends from grade school, and col­lege, as those were deep and sub­stan­tive, and it made sense to me. But there was a cliff — any­thing not deep and intense didn’t seem wor­thy of effort. Which I do think is, and, was mis­take. We need deep con­nec­tions with other peo­ple, but casual ones too. I gen­er­ally suck at main­tain­ing the casual ones

But chal­lenge your post raised in my mind is how hard it is for most adults to find other peo­ple they can com­fort­ably have sub­stan­tive con­ver­sa­tions with. It’s really quite hard, at least here in Amer­ica. It’s so easy to offend, so easy to find peo­ple who mostly want to talk about them­selves, so easy to find peo­ple who pre­fer not to lis­ten but to tell what you’re doing wrong or give you advice. The art of con­ver­sa­tion is mostly lost I think, or mostly never even mastered.

I run a group called the Socrates Cafe, which is vaguely an attempt to pro­vide a place for peo­ple to dis­cuss big things. A place that’s friendly, safe, open, but wise, smart and chal­leng­ing too. These groups have been pop­u­lar, in part, because I think there are few places peo­ple really feel safe to talk about what they *really* think or how they really feel.

Love to hear your advice on how to seek con­ver­sa­tions of sub­stance, over the superficial.