Easy Conversation

Sometimes you find yourself at a dinner table with a group of people. Conversation is lagging. Everyone is looking around the room, trying to think up something to say. A funny incident happens across the restaurant and the tension is relieved. Everyone starts chatting again, and then the group settles into conversation on some topic. Let’s say it is about drinking coffee. This conversational topic is enough to engage the group for 45 minutes of involved discussion – by simply following a web of personal associations for coffee. One person mentions Kona coffee, another mentions the coffee they had in Hawaii, then conversation drifts toward other great places where people have had coffee. Polled in advance, no one at the table would have thought he or she had so much to say about coffee, or that a group of people could talk for so long about it. And yet, it happens without anyone steering the conversation in a particular direction. In good conversation, there is no conscious thought involved, very much as if we were talking to ourselves.