A Few Thoughts on How to Enjoy Conversations More
It’s so easy sometimes to ruin a good conversation opportunity, especially if you’re expecting a deep dialogue and then find yourself introducing one new topic after another with people you haven’t seen in a while and after a long Covid stretch when you’ve been shaped — against your style, so to speak — by the conversation habits of other people.
Well, this post may not be the most clear or specific of posts, but I feel compelled to address, as best I can without entering into the specifics of private conversations, a few issues.
First of all, I was reading in a book the other day that you should start conversations — the author implied that all conversations — knowing what you want to get out of it. I disagree. This may work for most interviews, but soul-to-soul exchanges go all sorts of places, especially if you haven’t seen your conversation partner(s) in a while.
But I agree with one thing: while you may want to keep them open-ended, they can go awfully wrong if you don’t rein in your horses according to the length of the conversation, the place, the people, everything. The thing is, after a Covid-marked year of not meeting with friends in person (until I got my Pfizer vaccine and its booster), the moment I saw a good friend, I became a torrent.
