The Profound And Unexpected Gift of Small Talk

I love this line in “What A Wonderful World” that says: “I see friends shakin’ hands, sayin’ ‘How do you do?’ / They’re really sayin’ ‘I love you.’”

Whether or not it was the songwriter’s intention, I like the line because it gives weight and meaning to everyday kindnesses we can all participate in. And lately, I have been thinking about just the kind of interaction the song mentions—what we call small talk.

Photo Credit: Leo Hidalgo, Creative Commons

I’m not talking about shallow, guarded communication with people we’re close to, and not about gossip or griping either, but about the kind of pass-the-time conversation you make with people who you stand in line with at the post office, or speak to across the grocery store register, or sit next to on planes.

I’m an extrovert.

Beyond that, I grew up in a small southern city, so my affinity for chatting might not be much more than a product of my personality and my upbringing. And I get why people don’t like small talk—it saps energy, it can feel fake and awkward, it wastes time, or if it’s the only kind of talking we know how to do, it can distract us from more lasting and authentic connections.

But at the moment, as all my screens are filled with voices telling me who all the “thems” are in the world and to what degree I should cross my arms at those people, these friendly conversations feel like an important exercise, even like their own form of vulnerability.

When I stop and say, “that’s my nephew’s name,” or “my brother lives there,” or “it is so nice to have the sun back out” instead of burrowing into my inner to-do list (or, let me join the chorus, into my phone)—

I get to participate in a tiny moment of shared people-ness.

Asking a question or smiling or saying hello is a small thing that helps me realize all the people around me aren’t chiefly people around me, they’re people—real, live individuals. It’s like when you hear the person you’ve been silently sitting next to in an airport terminal call someone to tell them the plane’s finally boarding:

Woah, someone’s waiting to pick them up—that’s a whole person—with a whole life.

Finding a reason or a way to connect, even for two minutes, involves imagination and effort and sometimes uncomfortably honest assessments of ourselves. It takes time and energy and humility, none of which are resources that are easy to be generous with. But it’s something that enables us to see others, the other, even, as a little more real.

When somebody asks, “So is your workday just starting or ending?” they’re really saying:

“I see you. You’re a person. There you are.”

In a time when it’s easy to find out why someone thinks I should be in a different and competing camp from the one my neighbor is in, these interactions are handfuls of soil that I can use to create our common ground. If we can’t practice finding common ground, even small tracts of it, in these everyday ways, I’m not sure we will know how to find it when it really matters—on the big stuff.

I’m worried we’ll forget how to recognize it.

Or that we will give up looking for it.

We have to keep training our eyes to look for the places where we can meet each other. And for me, sometimes this looks like opening myself to conversations that reveal no more or less than that the back and forth temperatures make us both get allergies, or that the rainy day makes it hard to get unsleepy, or that it’s a bummer but not the end of the world to get stuck in the airport.

I was listening to a live performance on the radio the other night, and when one of the hosts was welcoming the crowd she said, “I’m just glad we’re here the same time you’re here.” For me, that seemed like a fitting way to think about small talk:

Hey, you’re here and I’m here—isn’t that something.