The Art of the Chat: An Ode to New York

Vienna, Austria.  I’m craving a good conversation, and I’ve got New York on my mind. The Viennese, I’ve come to realize, don’t do chats. Viennese conversations with strangers, while perfectly polite, are purely transactional. Ask one question, you get one answer.  (In fact, Viennese conversations with foreign-looking strangers don’t even reach the transactional level.  A woman at the grocery store ran away from me today.  But that’s another story. . .)

New York chats, on the other hand, are anything but aseptic. Ready or not, New Yorkers will weave their personal lives into the most impersonal of topics. Do what you wish out of this unrestrained (often TMI) openness. A recent overheard conversation captures it all:

Waitress: It’s better to drink tepid water.
Customer: What’s tepid?
Waitress: Lukewarm, like i how I feel about my husband.

Ah, New York. So special. 🙂 New Yorkers are open books with anybody willing to listen. Accustomed to being ‘polite’ and respectful of other people’s personal space, most outsiders would cringe at this overexposure. In most parts of the world, the norm for ‘proper’ conversation, particularly with strangers, remains within the boundaries of the “safe topics” — the weather, where we went, what we did. Consequently, interactions are sterile and forgettable. I would add that when dialogue is limited to how great things are going and what achievements we’ve accomplished, the result is boredom. Alain de Botton, in his School of Life series, says that for meaningful conversations to occur, one should have the courage to go beyond the facts, and venture into the uncomfortable territory of feelings, vulnerabilities and failures.

Maybe it’s the small living spaces that force New Yorkers to make a living room (or therapist office) out of the entire city, or maybe it’s a certain loneliness that makes us seek connections. But New Yorkers frequently and willingly dive headfirst into this uncomfortable territory de Botton speaks of.  A woman in my morning commute asked for a tylenol and regaled me with stories of the ex-boyfriend she had met up with the previous night; another woman crossed a crowded subway car to ask for my stylist’s contact details and told me about the fight she had with hers; the cashier at the grocery store recounted the emergency call she got from her son’s school about her son’s antics.

Of course, this rawness does not always lead to pleasant encounters (such as getting kicked out of cabs, or unwanted advances). But if we do not instantly reject these encounters, and instead, remain open to them and what they can offer, this lack of censorship can forge profound connections, even for a tiny moment. Contrary to what we’ve been taught about “polite conversations”, de Botton proffers that people actually appreciate being shown others’ failures and vulnerabilities. This has less to do about wanting to see others fail, and more about wanting to know that we are not alone in our struggles. Knowing “that our own sorrows have echoes in the lives of others” is what connects us.

After a particularly difficult breakup, I took a lunch breather at one of the benches in Rockefeller. A middle-aged man in shorts and sneakers, with elegant salt and pepper hair, sat next to me. After some silence, he casually mentioned he used to work in the area but quit the law profession to try his hand at entrepreneurship. We got to conversing; I prodded a little more about his life. He mentioned his wife had divorced him.  He went through a tough period, he recalled, but is in a much much better place. He then said, “Look it all boils down to this: we all just have to relax. Life has a way of working out.”

If we find the courage to bring our conversations to new depths, we may be pleasantly surprised.  Even in a large, impersonal city such as New York, we are offered countless opportunities to discover that at the other end of the dialogue is a person with the same struggles as we do — of finding an apartment, of finding love, of finding solace, of making it here. Through these meaningful conversations readily available at any corner grocery or park bench, the city becomes our surrogate family. It consoles us, uplifts us, encourages us, makes us feel less alone, and effectively makes itself enormously difficult to leave.

 

I would love love love to hear your thoughts.  Drop me a line in the comment section below.