The Alchemy of Conversations
Pure conversations, I have felt, are the times we listen the best. Great conversations have a flow that seems to dissolve the identity between the people engaged in it. When I reflect back on such conversations, I have little idea of who spoke what. There were no arguments, just reflections. Thoughts never overtook conversations — they evolved by living in the stillness of each moment.
In the end, all I remember is that I was engrossed in it, with little idea of time or space. And they have left me refreshed, by and large, even those at the end of a long day. Or, as has happened many a time in our recent past — long nights as well. I wonder if it is true for others as well, but I rarely remember such conversations after a while. However, I know for sure that what I am, I know, or feel has changed with every such conversation. Strange then, that the word conversations quite often brings to mind images of commonplace talk, gossip, or idle chatter.
In fact, some of the best thinkers were open conversationalists. Seems like many of them used conversations to clarify their view, enrich it, and above all learn from it. All great pieces of work — be it films, stories, poems, paintings, friendships, etc. are conversations of the soul.
We are therefore a result of the conversations of the past, and what we will be will result from the conversations we have in the future. Conversations that relate to the work we do today and tomorrow, the company we are today, and that we will become tomorrow, the individuals we are today and that we will be in the future.
All of us hold in ourselves many deep, interesting, creative, humorous, and original ideas and viewpoints that could relate to professional areas such as institution building or strategy as also various other areas of interest. Sometimes they lie undiscovered and at other times, discovered but lost. And there are dozens, maybe many dozens of them, each coming from our unique points of view and our varied experiences, waiting for deliverance.
What’s better than great conversations? And those had with an appetite to embrace multiple perspectives in a manner that everyone finds their truth in it; with total openness and genuineness. And happiness above all!
The rest are all incidental — like a great article or a book or a presentation that comes from it. And we know from our experience that this can be an endless stream, simply because we deal with human beings and their life in our work, and how institutions relate to and change the lives of the humans they come in touch with and in the process change themselves.
