I Hear There’ll be Weather Tomorrow
I’ve never been particularly good at small talk. I always viewed small talk as saying nothing and I sort of felt, well, if you’re not going to say anything, then maybe you should actually not say anything. So it wasn’t a skill I worked at, and, well, little practice leads to little progress.
God pointed out to me, though, that I do engage in such diminutive banter, but that I don’t necessarily do it for the same reasons as other people, and therefore, I don’t necessarily even do it in the same way. She explained to me that small talk is to personal relationships what oil is to my car’s engine. It’s lubrication. It’s there to keep things from getting too hot, from scraping together to the point of destruction while the connection between people is still tentative, still being worked out, still getting up to speed. I, on the other hand, have mostly used it as a way to pass the time, to interact with a friend when the interaction is wanted but when there really isn’t any immediate reason for it to happen.
So for most people, one of the main uses of small talk is to figure out if the person they’re talking to is worth talking to, for them, but I’ve mostly used it only once I’ve already figured out that the person is worth talking to.
It makes me wonder how many other things I may have gotten backwards.
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