The Lost Art of Conversation

I confess! I am a talker. Around here, they politely call me verbose.

But honestly, I love to talk with others. I love to meet new people and go to new places, and I never meet a stranger. I perceive every person that I encounter as a new adventure and potential new friend.

I get this trait honestly. In fact, I come from a long line of talkers on my father’s side of the family. With 13 aunts and uncles, their spouses, and 36 cousins, we Wilson children learned early on to talk loudly if we wanted our opinions (and needs) known. 

But believe it or not, I am also a great listener. I think this trait was both inherited and learned. After all, with such a large family, it is no wonder that we had several great storytellers in the bunch. So I learned early on to listen in awe as these stories of our past were told and retold. Even as a child though, I knew that many of these tales were highly elaborate. Some might even have called them exaggerated to the point of fiction.

Whatever the case, I loved to hear my uncles sit around and share stories of my great-grandfather and other men and women from our past. Those storytimes were probably the first moments in my childhood when I learned to sit perfectly still and lean in to hear every nuanced detail of their tall tales.

But truth be told, my listening skills were also developed through repeated spankings from my daddy. In his defense, I was often reminded (and warned repeatedly) that kids were meant to be seen and not heard. In the presence of other adults, he added, “Only speak when you are spoken to.”

Perhaps his greatest admonition though was when he told me that God had given me two ears and one mouth because He was advising me to listen twice as much as I spoke.

Ironically, I chose to interpret this bit of instruction to mean that since I did indeed have so much to say, I would just need to increase my listening time to accommodate my many, many words that desperately needed to be spoken.

Thus, a talker became a listener – and in turn – a conversationalist.

I especially love having a conversation with new people and people who have experienced things I have not. I even enjoy a real conversation with people who totally believe the opposite of me on any given topic.

Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to have that type of conversation anymore. Disturbingly enough, it appears as if our world has totally lost the art of civil discourse.

It also seems that we can only communicate with people who agree with us. Otherwise, we verbally lash out, change the subject, deflect from the topic, or totally shut down, walk away, and forever avoid that person in the future.

Social media may be the culprit behind this disturbing trend. For in that faceless venue, people definitely have no problem expressing their personal opinions, even on topics that really should be discussed behind the closed and private doors of their homes. 

Facebook is the worst social media site in which we see this communication breakdown play out. Without regard for the feelings or beliefs of others, I have seen grown men and women from every walk of life post these sweeping, controversial statements. Then, they acted shocked and highly offended when their FB friends had the audacity to disagree with them.

From that initial point of disagreement, the downward spiral was almost instantaneous. First, came the hurt feelings, then the emotional offense, and then total outrage.

How dare someone have a different opinion! And how alarming that this person would pen that different opinion on a personal FB page. How rude! How inconsiderate! How appalling!

So…click! With one swift move of the hand, that offensive person was simply removed from the friend list and blocked. And the funniest thing of all, their offensive and opposing comments were forever erased. Not only will there be no further interaction with this offensive individual, but their horrible words were also now nonexistent – as if they were never written at all.

Forget friendship; forget reality, and forget the prospect of having a real conversation with the back-and-forth of sharing and learning from each other.

This type of post was never really about conversation in the first place. Quite the opposite! We have sadly become a world of individuals with “itching ears,” people who talk with the express purpose of finding agreement and self-validation.

My daddy probably would have quoted one of our family’s oft-used Bible verses about these types of FB posts, “Even a fool is thought wise till he opens his mouth.”

He also might have added that “silence is a fence around wisdom,” because it is. But somehow, we have forgotten that truth.

Not only have we knocked down the fence of silence, but we have also bulldozed the ground it stood on. And in its place, we have dug a deep, dark, endless pit of SELF:  Self-validation, self-acceptance, self-confidence, self-awareness, self-image, self-preservation, self-fulfillment, self-advancement, self-esteem, self-centeredness, self-promoting, and lest we forget, the ubiquitous self-ie.

In fact, my Google search brought up a 3-page alphabetical list of words beginning with self. So, if you are going to take the time to read them all, be aware. You could become self-obsessed.

With all joking aside, I would love to see our society get back to real-life, face-to-face conversations that help us all learn and grow in knowledge and empathy.

So, can we please teach this next generation of Americans the lost art of civil discourse?

Can we also teach them to think, reason, and civilly debate, without a rote, media-based set of talking points? And can we possibly teach them how to listen to others, even when they adamantly oppose the viewpoints of the speaker?

I think it might just be imperative that we do so. As Winston Churchill once said,

“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” 

And if we cannot courageously regain the art of talking AND listening, we may be in desperate trouble, for 2 Timothy 4:3-5 warns us:

For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry (NIV).