I've noticed something lately, that I hardly have words for. I sat at a meal with someone I didn't know very well, and someone I did know. We started talking about something I'd learned -- the existence of another book group, actually, that might be as hard-core as ours. And the person I did know jumped right into a conversational pattern that I do all the time with my best friends: imaginary what-if. "You should challenge them." I riffed on that. We should have a tug of war. No, better, we should have a book-analysis competition. No, better, we should assign them a book and then watch them discuss it and then tell them all the points they didn't discuss.
What I noticed was how flat the other person at the table was. This game, this imaginary what-if conversation, wasn't fun. She wanted to talk about real life. She didn't mind us jumping into it, but I could tell that she thought it was a little silly, and she was waiting for the real conversation to come back, the one that dwells in the here-and-now and the probable.
I noticed that and a big click went off in my head, and I've been thinking about it ever since. The truth is I pretty much hate conversations about real life. Do I really hate them? No, that's not true. They have their place. There's a certain necessity, and even a certain beauty, in speaking about what is. But almost always, those conversations are jumping off points. I like the part where we get into imaginary. I like the humor and rapid-fire banter of crazy silly imaginary-what-if conversations. But I also like the "I wonder what that means about the person who said that thing to you," kinds of questions. I like going from facts in real life to hypotheses, or patterns, or lessons. Why are these facts significant? What meaning is there to be construed from them? What larger purpose do they represent?
There are people who mostly like to talk about facts in real life. They think those conversations are real, and the others, about the invisible stuff, the imaginary what-if games or the speculations about motives or patterns or possibilities -- they think those are time wasters. Once I noticed this, I wondered why I hadn't noticed it before. Those are people I don't have an easy time clicking with. When I get stuck in a conversation that has no possibilities besides the exchange of facts in real life, I feel a little desperate and trapped. I can do it of course. But it's not much fun. Are you like this, too?