By Mike Vinopal

When you hear the phrase the art of conversation, for some it might evoke a caricature of an old-timer talking about back in their day. And for some of you, it may pull at your nostalgia strings as you resist the urge to sound like the aforementioned caricature.

Then there may be others who practice this art daily in all of its shades and variations, both in the written form and orally. Without question, there is immense value in the written form. It’s kinda why we’re all here reading stuff. But for the purposes of this piece, I’m going to focus on the oral form.

Long gone are the days when commuters would make small talk on public transit. Even with the advent of ridesharing technologies, often politeness means to disengage with the other human being(s) you’re sharing a few moments with as you navigate the world. Lines we stand in, the waiting rooms we inhabit...out come the smart phones. Down go the eyes.

I remember my grandma being the best at it. Her name was Grace. Fitting. She could strike up a conversation with any stranger and in those brief moments they shared, she was able to establish a special vulnerability and closeness with another human being no matter who they were or where their paths had converged. Cashier, fellow shopper or line waiter, random member of the neighborhood. What I didn’t appreciate about it then was the power each one of us holds to influence the course of someone else’s day, just by giving a little shit.

However pointless or banal it may seem at the time, small talk might end up giving one person a moment in which they feel like they belong and have worth. That one person might really need that moment.

For instance, Person A navigating the world. His family does not accept him, constantly criticizes, and shows no love. His coworkers provide no connection and he has no one he considers a close friend. Isolation gets so heavy that a kindly old woman sharing a few moments in a waiting room with Person A vanquishes that cloud of isolation, even if only for those brief moments.

That’s where the art part comes into play.

Some days all we can manage to do is fake it when engaging with a stranger that wants to chat as we go about living our lives.

Somehow my grandma never really had to fake it. Call it practice, call it patience, call it whatever you like. I say she was a master of the art form. What is required to be a master of the art of conversation?

She was able to come from a genuinely sincere place when she talked with people, which was often. She made people feel seen and heard and like they mattered. In the span of minutes, she made the person feel like she cared about not just them, but their family and their dreams too.

I know that I can’t do it every day but I also know that I can’t do it without practice either.

I think we are randomly crossing paths with people we can learn from every single moment of every single day. We all have perceptual blind spots to fill in because at the end of the day, we are all prisoners of our own perception. An our individual perception is not a lens we can lend. We have to talk about it.

While I realize I’m about to start sounding like some old-timer, back in the day we took advantage of a lot more opportunities to have a conversation with a stranger in passing. I’m not sure it was a friendlier time but we valued different things as a community and we navigated the world in a much different way.

Maps were made of paper, bound in road atlases, where the wear correlated with the number of road trips taken. Telephones were landlines. Yelp was talking to each other about what’s good in town and what sucks. Facebook was actually visiting your friends and family wherever they might be.

Nowadays we squander chance meetings like we do pennies. We avoid eye contact. We order groceries to be delivered. We Amazon every other thing imaginable. For some, that includes exerting extra effort to ignore the commercial support of a super-villain-look-alike gazillionaire. At least I do because fuck that guy.

I just want people to come together. Most people wouldn’t say half the shit they type. And just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. Where’s the art in that? A sarcasm font isn’t a technology I want because it would give us just another excuse to not communicate with our voices and our eyes. Inflection and volume. Pauses between the words not measured in space bars. All that we share in simple glances. I want those things.

I want people talking and sharing their lives. In person. On the phone. We can use video conferencing for more than business meetings and take time to ask questions and learn about the incredible lives of the people we love. That kind of practice can hone the art form considerably.

And then maybe we’ll all be a little more like my grandma Grace. Because then we’ll all feel more connected in what can often feel like a lonely-ass world.