Being mindful of our conversations

Photo by Briana Tozour on Unsplash

Like many Irish people, the last time I have actually paused for breath in a conversation and listened to someone uninterrupted, was back in 1982.

I would have been three at the time, so, in fairness, my language skills were only taking off. And frankly, I probably felt, in my innocence, that other people just had more to say.

I’ve never looked back. Conversation became - still is - one of the great pleasures of my life. I listened to the experts, of course, of which there were many among my family and friends, and learned from them - the cut and thrust of their conversations, the jabbing nature of Dublin sarcasm, their ready wit, the relentless pace of interactions, the social bonding that happens through interruptions, and their in-built empathy.

There’s also their sheer ubiquity. There was only one excuse for being late that my mother invariably used (she was, I should add, always late). ‘So and so’ (eyes to heaven) put her commither on me’ - as if she was not perfectly capable of putting her commither on someone else.

I watched, at close quarters so many times, the famous hallway ‘tea dance’ between host(ess) and visitor who had randomly called by. ‘I’ll stick on the kettle’ (the hostess retreats towards the kitchen a step); ‘no, I’m not staying’ (the visitor advances into the house a step), and so on, step by step, invitation and protestation thickly layered on top of each other, until the kettle was on, the tea was made, and an hour or more spent in conversation. How does an outsider even get inside this culturally opaque interaction? Dare to refuse a drink once in the UK or the USA, and you’re left on your uppers, mate.

To cap it all, I even wrote my Leaving Cert English essay on ‘The Art of Conversation’ (do you remember those slightly vacuous English essays on subjects examiners deemed of interest?); my A1 (still glowing from that, admittedly; it’s a fresh 23 years ago now) convinced me that I’d fully arrived, master of the art I most adored.

Years later, I distracted myself from the pangs of labour with child No. 3, by researching, while bouncing on the birthing ball, into the etymology of the word gossip. Since you ask - it comes from godsibb - God’s kin-, which came to refer to the women who surrounded women giving birth and whiled the hours away, chatting; you can imagine what followed...

The great benefit of living in your birth-country is that you end up thinking that you’re, roughly speaking, normal. The great(er) benefit of living abroad is that you know, at last, that you’re not. I’ve now lived 16 years of my adult life as a migrant, so I speak as an outsider-insider. I still talk at speed, across and over other people in my anxiety to affirm them, bond with them, recreate a culture I genuinely miss (and think, conversationally, second-to-none).

Eight years living in reticent Britain did not cure me. In fact, it probably exacerbated the problem. They pause more often and, in my native urge to fill awkward gaps, I, as often as not, swooped in. Several years living in the slow-talking midwestern US has not helped either, although I’m firmly convinced that no male over the age of 50 has ever understood more than 20% of what I’ve actually said. Oh well. My husband is still under 50.

So I’m here today to write to you, obviously, about the power of silence. I’m not really in a position to preach, which actually might be an advantage. Wouldn’t you trust an alcoholic more than a teetotaler talking about the dangers of alcoholism?

The truth is I was challenged recently by a friend for over-sharing, for over-talking. It cut deeply, especially as I have many deep friendships in which I take great delight, in whose trust I am honoured. Like most uncomfortable accusations, it was uncomfortable precisely because of its grain of truth.  It forced me to rethink what I told and to whom, and why I was telling what I was in the first place. Were my motivations decent ones? Was it frivolity, snobbery, judgement, just the desire to be a conduit for interesting News? Was I building up or tearing down?

 There’s an old cliche of sociology that men tend more towards ‘report talk’ and women tend more towards ‘rapport talk’. We all know, from our lived experience that girl-chat can be primarily people-chat; our social bonds tend to be far closer than males - we are, after all, the relationship experts. And as a result, we have a responsibility to make our conversations the decent kind, the kind that bring healing and light and depth; we also need to make good decisions about whom confidences and vulnerabilities are best shared with. 

 And occasionally, it’s good just to pause, and listen. My husband has the kind of gruelling medical specialism where he gets to tell families the worst possible news about their child’s health all the time. He is adamant about the importance of respectful, attentive silence, in sitting with these families, in holding their pain alongside them, in the power of the compassionate unsaid, in allowing them to open up, if and when they feel the need. Truly making space for another is something most of us do relatively seldom.

 Perhaps, to be genuinely supportive godsibbs, able to hold friends in their vulnerabilities as well as their strengths, our girl-chats should be measured as much by the warmth and openness of our silences as by the number of our words?