Fresh Water

Many of us are pretty isolated day to day. Routine keep us working in the same circles, either at home or a regular workplace. What little conversation we have is mostly about the trivial and commonplace. Hours, days, then weeks and months pass; the world whirs by at record speed. Seems like everyone else is going somewhere (but not really), while we are at a standstill. It’s hard to recall the last time we had a new thought or a good conversation about something other than the weather or which bills have yet to be paid or what we might be having for dinner.

What makes for interesting conversation? Have you enjoyed one lately? To be stimulating and interesting, a conversation has to involve something of significance beyond the moment; it goes beyond the immediate and includes analysis. For that to happen, the participants cannot be stagnant pools themselves; streams of fresh thoughts, ideas, concepts, and reasonings must be accessible—rustling streams of thought from which refreshing handfuls can be drawn up into the mind like a cool drink of water to parched lips. Without an inlet of new, oxygenated thoughts, conversation is almost sure to be flat, lifeless, same-old, same-old.

So, where do we find an inlet of fresh thoughts? Fresh is an interesting word and could be misunderstood, since “there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). What I mean is that we all need to be thinking thoughts that are new to us. We will either be learning and growing, or we will soon begin to stew in our own juices and our conversation will take on the unhappy aroma of dead people’s clothes—thirty years out of date, twenty-nine years in an airless closet.

New thoughts, worthy thoughts, intriguing thoughts are seldom captured in soundbites or captions. Yet so much of our modern world thinks that way: short, choppy, perforated, postage stamp-sized thoughts. Television spoon-feeds us with junk. Social media is style and almost no substance. We get fifty-word snippets because the modern attention span can’t bear seventy-five word snippets—that is where we find ourselves. And we will become such people unless we dig in our heels and resist. But how do we resist? First by realizing that we not lose contact with the real world if our smartphone is silenced and in the other room.

Try thirty minutes without a smartphone or a computer—thirty minutes in a solid, comfortable chair with a book in your hands. Close the door. Don’t choose entertainment and don’t choose some career-advancing, how-to-crush-the-competition book. Pick something that stands a chance of deepening your mind.

Read about something you don’t already know through-and-through, something that will require you to think harder than usual and consider and weigh one thought against another. Before long, you’ll be interested and thinking new thoughts—and you just might be more interesting, too. Interested people are interesting people. Conversations improve when the almost-stagnant pond isn’t stagnant anymore. Fresh water stirs up new life. –TSA