Quietly Revolutionary: Reclaiming the Art of Engaged Conversation

In a world with curated digital personas, choosing to listen is an act of defiance….but also an act of love.

Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash

Facebook, LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Youtube, Tik Tok, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Tumblr, Reddit, Discord. Whatsapp, Signal, Text messaging. Voicemails. A simple phone call.

Never before have we had so many ways to share.

To be heard.

To connect.

But a question more of us ask everyday is “Are we really connected?” Performative authenticity, filters, and AI slop is making it hard to find a genuine thread that can tie you to someone. If we do find it, it is only enough for a 10–20 second scroll.

Yesterday, I remarked out loud how crazy the price of beef was: “$44 for a tenderloin no bigger than my palm, what else is in this thing, age reversing properties?” The woman next to me acted as if I was not even there. Perhaps there were some other dynamics at play (race, age) but I didn’t even get a prissy tight lipped smile in good southern fashion.

However, my past experience has shown me that when I do find someone willing to share….oh share they do! They are usually bursting at the seams to share. They are a gushing volcano of feelings and opinions. There isn’t much way of exchange or active listening, because they become swept up in the fact that someone is actually listening. Oh me, oh my! Imagine!

As much as there was that awkward silence in the supermarket, I know that it was worth the effort, because one day, when it lands right, the landing will be a wonderful feeling to have shared that moment of shock or laughter with another person.

We may be tired of 20+ years of online methods of getting to know one another. I think…we miss the old fashioned, one-on-one conversation. I also think we are scared to initiate such interactions for various reasons: Are they recording me? Will what I say end up online somehow and used against me in the future in some manner? Is this person speaking to me right now a completely, terrifyingly awful person online?

But I think it is worth the risk.

It is a risk that is better–at least for me–than the digital wall utilized for people to bulldoze through social conventions of politeness and kindness. I’ve been yelled at many times via text message or some kind of app used to request a service. I always ask “Would this person have spoken to me like this if I was face to face with him/her?” Social etiquette has changed, and I think it makes it hard to take the first step to engage in a conversation with a person over crazy prices in the supermarket, or at least doing so in smallish cities like my own, which is counterintuitive, eh? But that is what I have experienced. Perhaps being a New Yorker has spoiled me: as grouchy and bristly as our vernacular is, we do talk to one another.

So I have been asking myself, how do I create throwback random conversations — that are about sharing but also hearing — with folks in my neighborhood, or at the library without being super creepy or cougar-y or giving weirdo vibes (not quirky weird, but like “Do you own a black trench coat–weird?”)?

Well, first, I am still going to talk to people at the grocery store, it is part of my Caribbean-gal DNA. That goes for forcing the person next to me on any public transportation to answer questions that they really don’t want to answer “I really like your shoes, where did you get them?”(How NYC women struggle with answering this one!).

I think the challenge to engaging with others right now is first, trust. We have become so accustomed to curated online personas, that maybe it is hard to know how much to share in person, with whom and how close do we let people in. How do we navigate the current political divisiveness that seems to infect many aspects of our lives?

Second, how do we let people in with boundaries? Politely and kindly conveying that these conversations are not “girlfriend moments”, but a human moment for connection that reminds us of our humanness.

I’ve also learned that being the receptacle of other’s outpouring of emotions can be draining. While at the same time giving space to just patiently listen, and making someone feel heard, can be a radical gift in this day and age. It is why I write. I don’t always feel heard in my everyday life. Being a mother, a daughter, a once-upon-a-time wife — my emotional sponge was/is saturated. You don’t have to have those labels to feel the way I did (or do still), you could be the caregiver person in your social circle, and you wonder, when will someone listen to me?

We can share and listen in a deeper way if we try.

We all crave it.

I will continue to move forward in engaging others, even when I think it may be trouble or scary or even a waste of time. Then I will resist the urge to react and just….be quiet. Let the silence be an invitation to more. Shared silence can be magical for ourselves as well as the people around us, it can be a welcome mat to rediscovering one aspect of humanness or ubuntu, the one where we look at each other as just a human being…not a vehicle to a transactional gain.

So simple, yet in this day and age, quietly revolutionary.

“Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language. It speaks of the very essence of being human… It is to say, ‘My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours.’ We belong in a bundle of life.”

— Archbishop Desmond Tutu