Conversations

Oftentimes it has so happens that a conversation with someone or some people leaves me drained and exhausted. I have wondered why that is the case and some deeper reflection has revealed the following. Conversations (even with yourself) are like meals. They are meant to nourish and sustain you, and promote growth. What your eat the tongue should find savoury, that is the first milestone. But more importantly, it should enter your stomach, be easily digested and absorbed and turn into muscle, bone and blood.

Some conversations on the surface look like fun - chirpy, frothy, gossipy. They are like junk food, good to see, smell divine, even the taste-buds go into salivary overdrive, but they full of empty calories with very little goodness. They enter the system and lie heavy on the digestion and possibly lead to ill-health. As much as I can, I try to avoid these junk-food, small-talk conversations, that make me feel later that I have lost a part of myself.

I wait for those rare, scintillating, exquisite ones, in which the words flow with ease, in a space of mutual trust and understanding. Where neither party is trying to show off their knowledge, or prove the other wrong, or just wants to skim the surface with words. Where listening is practised as an art and not extended as a favour. Where one listens with one’s whole being, not with just the ears or the brain. Where personalities are set aside, and the illusion of separateness dims and there is not only the meeting of minds but also of the essences. No one mentions, or maybe even notices it, but love sits there quietly holding everyone’s hand. And long after the conversation is over, its light lingers and transforms us ever so subtly, and we find that we have grown and taken a step towards our Higher Self.