Talk the talk

A longtime friend comes over…You see your spouse at the end of the hardworking day…Your child returns from the school…A relative drops in after a long gap…An ex-colleague bumps into you…Talk, we love to, with friends, families and near and dear ones (and perhaps, sometimes with foes too!!). Why just fights, even light talks and friendly banters can go on for hours. Not every time we can walk the talk still there is no denying the fact that talk we must. I don’t like it when the talk between the any two labelled as gossip (even if it is!). After a long phone-chat with friends or cousins, “Who were you talking about?” could be the question confronting us.

I too have gone through this situation umpteen times. After a phone call with the best friend, my mother, all ears to our conversation, would ask, “Was it this and this friend you were talking with?” I don’t like every girl-talk being dismissed as ‘gossip’, which often is the case.

Of course, gossip is a relative term. Family affairs, marriages and break-ups could be just gossips to some while for many; it’s a question of life and death. Many also discuss how a particular character in a tele-soap could have behaved. If discussing real life persons is gossip, what do you call the discussions over the characters in fiction? 

Whenever asked about any conversation, I was always armed with the famous saying, “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events and small minds discuss people”. It was my way of assessing my interactions. However, there could be much more to conversations than what apparently seems as gossip. Earlier, during my interactions with friends and families, I would realise that stress factors contributing to them were much closer to them than they appeared. However, after I started dealing with people for yoga therapy, interface with strangers fortified the fact.   

People discuss people not always because they love to gossip, but first, it bothers them and second, somewhere they discuss what happened to people can happen to them as well. One could really work on ideas when one can make peace with people. During an interaction with yoga therapy participant who was looking for stress management, I asked her to talk about herself and her reaction, neither people nor incidents. It worked wonders. I could get everything what contributed to her stress without digging into her personal life.

And it happened back to back. All my conversations, wither with yoga therapy participants, friends or kin, were just based on their states of mind and themselves. We never spoke about others. What you speak about others is insignificant, all that counts is individual reaction of coping with stressful incidents and people. So, can’t we have wonderful conversations with our near and dear ones? In most of the cases, it’s difficult to tell people from things. Talk your must, to get things sorted. Cross the stream where it is shallowest, isn’t it?

From that day onwards, I hardly classify my conversations as gossips. My idea is to talk more and more steering clear of the thin line between people and incidents.

-KanChan