Finding the Conversation Beneath the Conversation

A conversation is simply the exchange that occurs at the edge of the inner/outer, visible/invisible, spoken/unspoken, the meeting of you/me.

“Questions that have no right to go away are those that have to do with the person we are about to become; they are conversations that will happen with or without our conscious participation.”

David Whyte

Near the beginning of January 2019 I left for a work trip in London followed by a personal-pilgrimage-midlife-whatisgoingon?-resuscitation-mission in Ireland.

I felt lost, untethered, and very much in need of direction.

On the third night of the trip I woke up in the middle of the night and as I came to, I had the sense of walking in on a conversation.

This was more than some lingering jet lag haze. It was a full, rowdy conversation with animated bits of dialogue flying back and forth and my sense was that it had been going on for some time.

For a moment, I wondered if there were people actually talking in my tiny Airbnb apartment. And then I realized that the conversation that I had just walked in on, was one I was already in.

Who was exactly talking here? Was this between me and my soul? Me and God? I wasn’t sure and if this all sounds mystical and weird it’s because it was!

I realized in that moment that there was a conversation going on some place deep within me. It was buried because it hadn’t been given room in my life so it found a place to happen on its own—after hours, in the dark, on the outskirts of awareness.

And with this realization then a choice: I could keep ignoring it or I could gather the courage to enter it.

I got up, took an Uber to a 24 hr dinner, and started to write. Just now, I flipped through my journal to January 2019 and found the first of many pages from that night.

At the top, in big letters: “What do I need for the next 10 years?” That basic question was enough to get me into the conversation that would end up changing the course of my life. 

In a land known for its convivial and conversational approach to living I found many great conversation partners in Ireland. My friend Irish Rob and his father David Jones, a few quiet farmers that I met in the town of Dingle at Dick Mack’s pub, sharing a few pints and poems with Padraig O’Tuama in Dublin, and a day spent with my friend Lucas in Belfast learning about the ongoing need for a new conversation between protestants and catholics.

But really, most of the trip was spent alone. I drove around Ireland in my Nissan rental car listening to John O’Dononhue and David Whyte talk about “the conversational nature of reality” and the theme of conversation became an unfolding invitation.  

The Latin root of the word is Conversatia, and so a conversation really means a kind of “living with” or “in companionship with”.

A conversation is simply the exchange that occurs at the edge of the inner/outer, visible/invisible, spoken/unspoken, the meeting of you/me.

As Martin Buber says, “All real living is meeting”, so in this sense we’re always navigating multiple kinds of meetings aren’t we? Conversation is the heart of human life and organizational life.

How many conversations does every organization have at a given time?

How many conversations are occurring within you at a given time?

There are the conversations between you and: 

• your work (and who you are in relation to this work)

• a loved one (and your recent conflict earlier in the day)

• an unknown future (and what’s your next move as an organization)

• this moment of racial reckoning with white supremacy (and how you might do more than repost content)

• your team’s strategic initiatives for this quarter (and clarifying what you’re trying to accomplish together)

• a new client (and how you will bring genuine value)

• your compulsions and motivations (which for the most part remain invisible)

• the stories you hear, tell, and believe

• the texts and DMs you have yet to respond to

• and a multitude of others

Some of these conversations are hard, others are joy-filled, some riddled with conflict or mired in complexity, and some are easier than expected.

There are the conversations you’ve been avoiding, the conversations you are navigating, and the conversations you are wanting and waiting for.

How then, do we find and enter these and become truly conversant?

—

One of my leadership heroes and favourite conversation artists, Margaret Wheatley, says that, “Human conversation is the most ancient and easiest way to cultivate the conditions for change—personal change, community and organizational change, planetary change. If we can sit together and talk about what’s important to us, we begin to come alive.”

For as long as we humans have been here, it’s been the campfire, the circle, the table. Conversation has been the space where we sit with one another to share what we see and feel and think, and where we listen to what others see and feel and think.

A conversation is our most ancient and cutting edge technology for instigating change and I’m grateful for the work of our artists and peacemakers and agitators and parents and protesters and teachers—all those who help convene conversations for social and spiritual change.

For sure we need more of us enrolling in the art of conversation. We need to learn to listen with genuine presence—to listen longer than feels necessary—and to listen for more than agreement/disagreement but for encounter.

We need more generous and beautiful questions. We need more conversations that move beyond certainty and rigid fundamentalisms toward wonder and humility. We need more generative conversations that lead to tangible social change.

We need all of this. However, becoming conversant begins by entering the central conversation with one’s own life.

It’s this conversation that is most vital, as it animates all of the other conversations.

The depth and authenticity of all of the outer conversations will only be as real as the internal conversation that is unceasing (and often unconscious) within each of us. This is a conversation of identity and vocation—Who am I? What am I here to do? What is uniquely mine to offer to the world? How will I bring it forward?

—

In keeping with the adage, “You can’t lead others where you aren’t willing to go yourself”, here are two obvious and overlooked elements for entering the conversation:

1. Courage
David Whyte writes, “A real conversation always contains an invitation. You are inviting another person to reveal herself or himself to you, to tell you who they are or what they want. To do this requires vulnerability.”

Courage is needed to show up for the conversation you’ve been waiting for—to show up in work, and even, to show up in your own life.

2. Hospitality
Trips to Ireland aren’t required to find the conversation. But it will require a kind of a speed and space that is hard to cultivate: slow and soft. Being slow enough— attentive not hurried. And soft enough—curious not judgemental.

Reading Rumi’s poem The Guesthouse could be a first step, as you cultivate acts of hospitality for the whole person (for ourselves and others) where especially the uninvited guests of fear and failure are welcome to the table. 

I’m not sure what I was hoping for in Ireland.

Likely, a breakthrough of life altering insight combined with instantaneous change.

What I got was more silence and space than I knew what to do with. And in it, I slowly and clumsily became conversant with my own life. I found the conversation beneath the conversation—with my future, my fears, my deep hopes.

Finding the conversation beneath the conversation could mean becoming conversant with the buried, forgotten parts of yourself—namely being reunited with the core vision of your heart.

Finding the conversation beneath the conversation could mean finding that central conversation between what you most want in the world and what the world is asking of you.

Finding the conversation beneath the conversation could mean discovering the start of your next change.

—

Questions for reflection and action:

• If you were to put an ear down to the ground of your life, what are the questions bubbling beneath the surface that will not go away? 

• What conversations have you been waiting for? What conversations have you been avoiding? What conversations could you start?

• What is the courageous conversation you know you need to have, that your future self would thank you for? Who/what do you need to start it? And by having this conversation, what would it be like to become the ancestor of a future, freer, more alive you?  

—

POEM: Coleman's Bed

Make a nesting now, a place to which
the birds can come, think of Kevin’s
prayerful palm holding the blackbird’s egg
and be the one, looking out from this place
who warms interior forms into light.
Feel the way the cliff at your back
gives shelter to your outward view
and then bring in from those horizons
all discordant elements that seek a home.

Be taught now, among the trees and rocks,
how the discarded is woven into shelter,
learn the way things hidden and unspoken
slowly proclaim their voice in the world.
Find that far inward symmetry
to all outward appearances, apprentice
yourself to yourself, begin to welcome back
all you sent away, be a new annunciation,
make yourself a door through which
to be hospitable, even to the stranger in you.

See with every turning day,
how each season makes a child
of you again, wants you to become
a seeker after rainfall and birdsong,
watch now, how it weathers you
to a testing in the tried and true,
admonishes you with each falling leaf,
to be courageous, to be something
that has come through, to be the last thing
you want to see before you leave the world.

Above all, be alone with it all,
a hiving off, a corner of silence
amidst the noise, refuse to talk,
even to yourself, and stay in this place
until the current of the story
is strong enough to float you out.

Ghost then, to where others
in this place have come before,
under the hazel, by the ruined chapel,
below the cave where Coleman slept,
become the source that makes
the river flow, and then the sea
beyond. Live in this place
as you were meant to and then,
surprised by your abilities,
become the ancestor of it all,
the quiet, robust and blessed Saint
that your future happiness
will always remember.

David Whyte