A single conversation can change you for the rest of your life. I am not exaggerating. I not only believe this, I have seen it. I have lived it. I am sure you have too, at one time or another.
Most conversations do not, not only because the person we talk to is not capable of doing so, but because they do not wish to change us, and we do not wish to be changed. Change hurts, and can be a burden both for the one changed and the one who caused it. The anodyne rhythm of small talk is a comfort, a thick set of guard rails to keep us from plunging into the uncontrolled freefall that conversations can so easily become even when none of the people involved wish for it. No one wants to have an existential encounter when they greet a coworker before the first cup of office coffee; the effortless predictability of small talk protects us from this, from one another.
But you cannot live your whole life this way, or at any rate you should not. The old communitarians like to say that community is “constitutive” of who you are, but they were rather thin on the details for being so bold in their claims. That the conversations in our day to day lives make up who we are at a given moment is, I think, much closer to the truth, though still leaving out rather a lot of our constitution. So much of what I am is generated by what I talk about and who I talk about it with.
There is danger in having too few people in your life with whom you can move beyond small talk. The smallness of all your talk will make you small in turn. It might take you years to notice this. It might not be until after you are retired, and you no longer even have much small talk to speak of, as you continue to shrink smaller and smaller and passively wait for death.
To avoid this fate means to open yourself to the terrible risk of change, of not knowing how great or what, exactly, the change will be. Will the image of your world on which you rest the image of yourself be so utterly shattered that you’ll find yourself unable to put it back together again, or any other image in its place? Perhaps you will gain something of great value, but then perhaps you will simply lose your way, discovering an error without managing to obtain a truth. Possibly you will discover that you have been a great, embarrassing fool your whole life, and this was obvious to everyone but yourself. The possibilities are numerous, many are wonderous, though few are possible without some pain. And some are simply painful.
The possibility but not the promise of growth requires such risk. There are no guarantees, except that the safety of remaining small is the safety of an early death. Growth is elusive but when it begins, it begins with the end of safety. And this beginning, and this end, cannot be found in isolation or even in a book; they can only be found in conversation with other living, breathing, unpredictable human beings.
"There is danger in having too few people in your life with whom you can move beyond small talk. The smallness of all your talk will make you small in turn."
Something I spend too much time worrying about, and I've had a lot of time over the last year to worry. How can one go about changing this?