The Conversation Café

by Vicki Robin

We have followed the first rule of good conversation: we have shown up.

I'm sitting next to Jerry Garcia at the Grateful Bread. Okay, I'm actually sitting next to a life-size painting of Jerry nailed to a chair back—so, like everyone else in the café, I am technically alone. Typical, isn't it, in our disconnected world? Ten tables seating four to six. Ten people. And just one person per table. But tonight is different. It's Thursday evening, Conversation Café time. I'm ready for some BIG talk.

Five Conversation Café regulars and three drop-ins arrive, get their tea, coffee and snacks, and settle in around two tables we've pushed together. We leave empty chairs for latecomers. We are engaging in a very strange—but strangely normal—activity. We're making it safe to talk to strangers.

By coming we have followed the first rule of good conversation: we have shown up. In the six weeks we've been meeting at Grateful Bread in Seattle, I've noticed three basic ingredients to the magic of the Conversation Cafés: showing up, "shutting up," and speaking up.

Good conversation has the quality of an infinite game. You play for play, not for winning.

Showing up is not only arriving in time to talk. It's arriving in soul, ready to engage. "Shutting up" is about listening deeply. It's having as much curiosity about what others say as about parading out ones own opinions. "Speaking up" is risking saying what's really real for you. Ah, and there's a fourth rule: "Up." Conversing to enrich everyone. A conversation is like a game of hacky-sack ball. The point is to keep the ball up and in play, not to make the defining move. Good conversation has the quality of an infinite game. You play for play, not for winning. You might come to a natural stopping point, but everyone emerges the victor and the conversation continues with your next encounters.

(Shhh. My secret dream is that Conversation Café-ers will take this philosophical hacky-sack to the streets. Turn to their fellow gloomy bus riders and droopy-lidded latté-line customers and say, "I've been thinking about…")

As we do each week, we begin with introductions. We each say our names and something about our passions. In this space, we are not our jobs, our complaints, our manufactured personalities. The introductions are brief.

In this space, we are not our jobs, our complaints, our manufactured personalities.

"I've been on semi-retreat for a long time, trying to understand what is really true for me," says Mara, a sometimes animated, sometimes pensive, slender young woman who looks like an REI model and then knocks us out with her depth of thought. "Now I want to see if I can come back out into the world and function from that authenticity." As if to underscore her uncertainty about whether her insides match our outsides, she adds, "If you know what I mean."

Ed is next. His white beard, always at the same stage of grizzle, and his obsidian eyes give him the aura of a desert philosopher.

"I'm passionate about intimacy," he says. "How to be it. Do it. Know it. Especially in the city. How to find intimacy among strangers."

"Well, I hate the term simple living," says Chad, a sinewy merchant seaman with a background in community living and a current passion for Zen meditation. "But I'm trying to ask myself what is essential in my life and design my life around that."

"What makes a good conversation?" I say, plunking this question down, as I do in some form every week, "That's my fascination at the moment."

Without this flow through of the unpredictable, we could easily settle in to another ritualized weekly display of opinions-the kind that happen in churches, clubs and at dinner tables with frightening regularity.

Karina is a petite flutter of Southern sociability. The Scandinavian reserve of Seattle is a constant puzzle to her Bayou friendliness, and these cafes are points of light in the slate-gray atmosphere of this city. "I'm trying to apply principles of marketing to social change," she says, hands a-flutter.

The newcomers, attracted solely by the Web page, bring in their passions. They talk of gardening, of politics and of new economic models. They have a special function. Variety. Surprise. Without this flow through of the unpredictable, we could easily settle in to another ritualized weekly display of opinions—the kind that happen in churches, clubs and at dinner tables with frightening regularity.

Kate completes the circle. She's a victim-of-dot-com downsizing. "My life isn't what I expected it to be," she says. "I was laid off a while ago and no one seems to be hiring middle aged women with my skill set. I'm finding it hard to find my work, my people and really what my life is to be about."

After the introductions, I put a stack of index cards and some pencils on the table. Whoever has a topic can write it on a card. We fall silent, thinking. Some people write cards, some don't—either because they are reluctant or, for the moment, empty and open to what others bring to the table.

We each read the cards. The topics range from the practical to the esoteric: What does home mean? How can we create community in a city? How do barter networks work?

Today, we select my topic, conversation. Mara starts by raising the question: "Conversation for what?" We explore the different purposes of conversation and the different intensities one brings. Some speak; some remain silent. Their very silence is a presence that says, "Go deep. I am listening for your soul."

"I think it's not so much a case of what is said as that sense of connection," Kate says, "I can have a 'conversation' throwing a ball with my grandson."

"When I'm on the ship, there are long nights on the bridge where I can go deep with guys I might have nothing in common with in the daylight," Chad says. "I think there's something about the darkness, about standing side by side and looking off into the night together, that makes it easy to talk about things that matter." We spontaneously fall silent for a moment, savoring together such nighttime reveries.

Then off we go into the role of location and atmosphere for good conversation.

"What is this taboo against raising topics that matter with strangers?" I wonder out loud. "What would it take to break this taboo so we could enjoy such deep reflections more often? Especially since we live in cities and don't gather around the fire at night like tribal folks did."

Now Karina's whole body leaps into animation as she tells us about where she comes from in the deep South. "People talk!" she says. "They connect! They debate! They walk along the street in the evening, gathering neighbors for a movie or a barbecue. I just don't understand Seattle!"

Chad disagrees, "Everywhere I go I see lonely people. Here. Asia. And I think it's increasing."

Karina pushes her point about Southern hospitality and, when it seems that a debate is brewing, I muse, "Hmmm, is reserve a given? Is it place-specific, culture-specific? Are there situations when we are more open? Or is it a question of personality?"

Now everyone becomes animated. We all talk about times in our lives when the taboos just weren't there: in college, as young professionals without much of a reputation or a grubstake.

Sondra, one of the drop ins, talked about a beach shanty-town in Southern California she lived in right after college. Indoors was small and spare, outdoors was sunny and friendly. "After dinner we'd all just parade up and down the sand road, seeing what was happening. Sometimes we'd sing, sometimes we'd talk, sometimes we'd all rent a movie. I didn't know until right now how much I missed that."

"Maybe conversation is the wealth of those too poor to need to protect themselves?" I wonder. I am having an inner conversation that parallels the outer one. In fact, many of us grab more index cards as we speak, making notes that we'll carry away into our other lives.

I feel something stirring in me, a combination of fear and gratitude. This conversation itself is so rich and the more I like it, the more scared I get that it won't happen again. My walls are coming down. I am losing my cool. I take a risk.

"I'm going to be vulnerable here," I announce, so anyone who is scared of feelings can duck or get their shields up. "I am really enjoying our interaction and a little scared you all won't show up again. I really want this to work. Would anyone else be willing to reflect a bit on how this conversation is feeling to them?"

Suddenly Kate, the voice for lighter conversation fare, is crying. "I've been slapped down so many times for being too intense that I just don't risk much anymore—or not until I feel very safe."

"Me, too," Mara says. We go quiet. Looking at one another, we realize we just slipped into an uncommon space for virtual strangers. Chad's blue eyes shine. I risk looking right at him. I can see the pores in everyone's skin. We hold the moment as long as possible, like an exquisite oboe solo we are all listening to. The notes end, and we listen to the silence as long as we dare.

This, then, seems to be the final movement of the Conversation Café, a reflection on the conversation itself. It prepares us to separate. There are no promises made about seeing each other next week. We release ourselves, without bondage or baggage, into our separate lives.

We are all somewhat awkward suddenly and look around a bit like furtive lovers emerging from a motel. We've broken a major taboo. We've talked to strangers about things that matter to us. We don't say much about what just happened, yet we know. We know we've had a great conversation. And we know we're going to do it again. Right out in public. With strangers.

---

A postscript: Since 9/11, most people come to Conversation Cafés eager to explore that trauma with others. Enough of the media! We are the talk show. We tend to just do two rounds of introductory comments without cross talk and then follow the threads of interests around the table. How is 9/11 changing your life? Where do you see reason for hope? What are you now called to do?