by Kate Gaston
“What ho!" I said.
"What ho!" said Motty.
"What ho! What ho!"
"What ho! What ho! What ho!"
After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation.”
― P.G. Wodehouse
It all started with a fish named Zeus. We bought Zeus for my daughter’s birthday. I only agreed to the decision, really, because a fish seemed like less work than a puppy. Plus, hearts get broken when furry creatures die. So, off we went to the pet store where we bought a fish, a tank, a tiny tiki hut, and a plastic palm tree.
Zeus lived an adventurous life. This was largely by accident, a consequence of my forgetting to arrange fish-sitting services during our family vacations. There was also that time we went camping, and Zeus shared a corner of our tent. When we visited our nation’s capital, he enjoyed a lovely view of the Lincoln memorial from the windowsill of our room. Unperturbed, Zeus did what he always did, mostly chilling in his tiki hut.
Time passed, and there came a day I noticed Zeus slanting ever so slightly to the right, his whole body tilting along an invisible axis. Over the next few weeks, he listed further starboard. It was swim bladder disease, the blight and bane of aquarium-dwelling fish everywhere. No longer able to regulate his buoyancy, Zeus took to bobbing listlessly near the surface of his tank.
Thus began Zeus’s slow decline. Every morning, on my way to pour my first cup of coffee, I’d pass his tank. And every morning, he and I would play the game Is Zeus Dead Yet? The game would go a little something like this. He’d float motionless at the top of his tank. I’d stare down at him, trying to discern signs of life. Morning after morning, I’d lose the game, believing, surely, he was dead. But then he’d give the faintest flicker of a fin. This continued until the day Zeus finally lost the game.
A week or two before his demise, I watched Zeus attempt to swim down to his beloved tiki hut for the last time. With a heroic thrashing of fins and tail, he dove. He made it about halfway to the bottom of the tank before his strength deserted him. He stopped thrashing and went still. Straight away, his body bobbed upward, back up to the surface of the water. Watching this, a realization streaked across my brain. Good heavens, I thought, that’s it. That’s precisely what it feels like to be trapped in a boring conversation. You thrash and flail—working so hard to get to a place of conversational depth—but despite your heroics, you bob right back up to the surface.
Shallow conversations. Like Zeus, they relentlessly float to the surface until they die. We’ve all been there. Those harrowing moments after the church service ends. The line for school pick-up. Waiting to use the microwave at work. There you are, existing in a particular moment, occupying a particular space. And someone else is occupying it with you. What’s your move? To speak will be awkward. To not speak will be more awkward. The seconds tick by, the awkwardness and the silence stretch, lengthen between you.
In those seconds, you reason, we’re both humans, surely we can stumble upon some common ground. So, you speak. To your embarrassment, you hear yourself asking, “Spaghetti for lunch today, huh?” Your co-worker glances at you and says, “Yeah.” And just like that, the conversation dies a quick, shameful death. Or perhaps you take another stab at it, asking, “How was your weekend?” Your co-worker glances at the microwave, figures he has 57 seconds remaining in this conversation, and answers with a short list of typical weekend activities. The timer dings, he walks away, and you wonder if that was as weird for him as it was for you. The answer is yes. It was weird to him. It was boring to you. No one had fun.
Before we proceed to creative solutions for the conundrum above, perhaps it would behoove us to spend a moment considering why, exactly, we should trouble ourselves with conversation in the first place. Conversation can be uncomfortable, draining, time-consuming. Why, then, should we do it?
In Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age, he contrasts the mindset of primitive mankind with that of post-Enlightenment thinkers. The peasants working the field prior to the age of enlightened thinking would have believed themselves—their strengths, moods, and motivations—capable of being affected by forces outside of themselves. Taylor refers to this as a porousness of being, a free-flowing interchange between the outside world and man’s interior landscape.
The modern man, in contrast, might consider himself impervious to this exchange. He will, as Simon and Garfunkel sang so eloquently, be a rock, an island. He will consider himself insulated from the slings and arrows of life’s vagaries because he exists within his mind, self-contained, buffered. For this modern man, the idea of submitting himself to the inanities risked in conversation might seem ridiculous. On his island of self-sufficiency, how could small talk possibly benefit him?
To answer this, I’d like to offer a quote from Charles Duhigg’s recent book, Supercommunicators. In support of the powers of conversation and relationship, Duhigg references the Harvard Study of Adult Development. With 80 years of data, this multi-generational study is the longest-running study on the subject of human flourishing. The conclusion Duhigg presents is this:
“Social isolation, the researchers wrote, was more dangerous than diabetes and a host of other diseases. Put differently, connecting with others can make us healthier, happier, and more content. Conversation can change our brains, bodies, and how we experience the world.”
Call me unenlightened. Call me a peasant. But I’m convinced something akin to magic takes place between participants engaged in conversation. I believe—within the context of authentic, vulnerable conversation—we are changed in ways too mysterious to quantify. I don’t think I’m alone in believing this, either. It’s subtly reflected in the meta-modernist pendulum swing toward embracing informed naivete and the stance that connection, community, and story do, in fact, matter.
That’s all well and good. But the fact remains that small talk can really suck. How do we progress from the misery of mindless small talk to the place where magic happens? Here’s the truth. Small talk is never going away. But take heart. You’re not without agency.
Prepare yourself, then, for the weighty work of good conversation. Like a baker sprinkling flour over a countertop before attempting the sticky work of kneading dough, you must ready your conversational work surface with a flouring of small talk. Furthermore, you understand not all small talk is created equal. So, sidestep the dead-end questions. You know the ones: What do you do? Where are you from? Where do you live? These questions lead to conversational impasses because they don’t require your partner to consult their internal landscape for an answer. There’s no need for them to pause; nothing to mull over.
Some great alternatives can be found in Duhigg’s book. Instead of asking, “Where do you work?” he suggests, “What’s your favorite thing about where you work?” In lieu of, “Where did you go to college?” ask, “What made you choose that college?” You’re still in shallow, safe territory with your partner, but you’ve asked about their choices, their decision-making, and their values. You’re edging closer to their heart. And the heart matters.
In order to make your conversation count, it’s actually imperative to engage your partner’s emotions. But bear with me here. This doesn’t mean you need to ask about their deepest childhood wounds or their biggest life regret. Questions like those require an emotional scuba suit. Don’t start there. Instead, ask the questions which require, at most, a cheap pair of goggles.
If we think of conversation as an ocean, then way down in the depths exist a person’s cultural upbringings, worldviews, and belief systems. These submerged infrastructures, like elaborate coral reefs, support entire microcosms of personhood. Whole fascinating arrays of life bloom forth from these underpinnings. Perhaps, with time and trust, you’ll be privileged to learn of these structures. But in the meantime, just below the surface of the conversational waters, there’s much to learn of a person.
Take, for example, your neighbor’s choice of footwear. A whole series of life decisions led up to her purchasing that pair of yellow Crocs. Ask how she got to that place, and what makes her happy about the color. Ask how the arch support is treating her, and whether she’d recommend the shoes for everyday wear. You might consider asking someone else about favorite books they’ve read, or poems they’ve written. Ask about the dogs they’ve loved. Ask their opinion about adults who rollerblade. Ask about the dreams they’ve nurtured, the dreams they’ve repressed. Ask about the tattoo they’d get. Or the tattoo they’d never get. Or the tattoo they got but wish they hadn’t. All the passions and hates and apathy and regrets and rejoicing—all the myriad pinings of the human heart—are all down there, darting about, flashing in the sun one moment, obscured in the dim subconscious the next.
Emotions are the gateway to knowing and being known. Every single conversation will contain, at some point, an emotional entryway. Listen for it. Watch for it, too. Emotions will be reflected in facial expressions and body language. A word of warning, though. Notice the body language, but don’t assume you know how to interpret it. Things tend to go badly when we start assuming things. Even if you think you already know the answer, go ahead, ask the question. The whole point is to create opportunities for your partner to share what they’re feeling. They can’t do that if you bypass the question. The magic of conversation is not in the simple transmission of information from one person to another. The magic is in the mutual vulnerability taking place between the two of you. And this vulnerability, this alignment, can only be arrived at by the sharing of emotions.
Above, I mentioned a key component to having conversations, and it’s worth repeating. For the love of all things holy, listen. Listen. And once you’ve listened, show you’ve been listening. How does one show they’ve been listening? The first step is easy. Ask more questions. By asking more questions, you create space for your partner to clarify herself further, which allows for more entry points into vulnerability. The next step—and the strongest method to communicate active listening—is to repeat back, in your own words, what your partner just said. By summarizing what you’ve heard, you’re showing you’re putting in the work to comprehend your partner’s full meaning. Then, after you’ve summarized, ask if you got it right. If you didn’t get it right, you begin the whole process again, starting with more questions.
Let’s say you’ve dipped your toe into the water; you’ve asked a question that begins to tease out someone’s feelings or experiences. What happens if that person actually shares something vulnerable with you? Let’s return to our co-worker in the office lunchroom. He’s got 57 seconds before his spaghetti is finished in the microwave. So you ask, “What was your highlight from the weekend?” Notice he can no longer simply recite his weekend itinerary. Now, he must mull over his feelings about his various activities. After a moment’s thought, he replies, “My highlight? I got to see my kid score her first goal in a soccer game.”
At this moment, you’re at a crossroads. You could say, “Cool.” Or you could say, “I played soccer once.” You could even ask, “Did they win?” But what do all these responses have in common? They are all dead ends. What’s at the heart of your co-worker’s response? Here’s a hint: it’s not soccer. Even if his kid lost 17-1, he’d still feel the pride of a father who’s watched his little girl score her first goal. It’s that emotion, all warm and fuzzy, which is at the heart of his answer. It’s the entryway into a deeper relationship. But to walk through it, you must now reciprocate something authentic.
In order to reciprocate, you don’t have to match his story by telling him about that time you won your tee-ball game. Instead, attempt to match the timbre of vulnerability he’s just offered you. Identify the emotion humming from him, and, to the best of your ability, match pitch with it. When you find and hold resonance in the space between you, that’s where the magic happens. This same principle holds for any emotion, not just the warm, fuzzy ones. Got a friend who has a big decision to make? Match her intensity to show her you’re in it with her. If you find yourself in conversation with someone who is suffering, you don’t need to whip out sage advice or trite consolation. Often, it is enough to match their emotional pitch, and to reciprocate simply by saying, “It makes me sad to see you suffer. Tell me more about what you’re feeling.”
C.S. Lewis, in his book Weight of Glory, wrote, “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal…it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.” And herein lies the mind-boggling truth we must embrace when having conversations with humans. All the weird hobbies, all the passions and dislikes, all the footwear choices—all these glorious wonders—exist within every single person you ever met. Yes, even that person.
Of course, not all of the conversational fish are willing to be caught. Some are more wary than others and more cautious. Maybe some remember being caught in the past, bearing the trauma like a fish hook through the lip. Or perhaps you’re the one who’s nervous about going deep with someone. It can be scary. Why? Because sometimes there are sharks down there, circling, predatorial.
Contrary to what Shark Week would have us believe, however, sharks make up a relatively small percentage of fish in the sea. If there happen to be sharks in the conversational water you find yourself swimming in, my advice would be this: don’t bleed for them. You aren’t required to ooze your deepest, darkest vulnerability into every conversation. There’s such a thing as the right time, the right place, and the right person. You can identify the right person by their willingness to keep their conversational sharks at bay. Or, at the very least, they will recognize when they’ve torn a chunk out of your vulnerable bits and apologize. All that to say don’t let the possibility of sharks prevent you from wading a little deeper into the water.
Does it take a tremendous amount of emotional energy to carry a conversation to a place of depth? Yes, it does. But unless you’re willing to edge into those deeper waters together, a relationship will never move beyond acquaintanceship. Unless you’re willing to meet each other in conversation with authenticity and curiosity—yes, vulnerability—it doesn’t matter how much you struggle to swim down. You’ll bob right back up to the conversational shallows. You’ll miss out on that humming resonance of souls being reforged into something lovely by the effort.
The God we worship isn’t given to random coincidence. Chances are, if you find yourself in a particular time, a particular place, with a particular person, there’s a deeper story being written. Look for the plotline. Maybe you’ll see it, maybe you won’t. Either way, bear in mind that each person you encounter in conversation bears the nobility of God’s closest attention. He’s numbered the hairs on their head, just as he’s numbered yours. He’s orchestrated the days of their lives, just as he’s done for you. Each person you meet, with faint immortal echoes, reflects the multi-faceted glory of God. It’s his image in which they’ve been made, after all. Edge deeper into those waters of conversation, then, because it’s only there that you’ll encounter the hard, holy work into which you’ve been invited.
An Alabama native, Kate was homeschooled before it was even remotely considered normal. She completed her undergraduate degree at Bryan College and went on to graduate school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. For eight years, Kate worked as a PA in a trauma and burn ICU before ping-ponging across the nation for her husband’s medical training. She and her family are currently putting down roots in Nashville, Tennessee. Today, Kate enjoys homeschooling her daughter and tutoring in her local classical homeschool community. She also finds deep satisfaction in long, meandering conversations at coffee shops, oil painting, writing, and gazing pensively into the middle distance. You can read more of her work at her Substack: That Middle Distance.