Conversations: More Random Thoughts

 

Our secondary school days were interesting days because we had people from different backgrounds. The interesting thing was that we had people who were very young and very old sharing classes and the age differences could be huge unlike now when the ages are on the lower side and more homogenous among school and classmates. Our class had one of those oldies. He was a jolly good fellow from the Lower Shire and despite his nice sense of humour this good man refused to chat with the youngest of us. As he liked to say, kucheza ndi mwana ndi chimodzimodzi kucheza wekha. The good man equated talking to a kid to “conversing alone” if we have such a term in English. Time and again I find myself remembering his words which make more sense now more than ever because having a conversation has become a bit of a superpower nowadays.

The Venomous Hope whose written tantrums I have been lazy enough to let you read when unable to write observed that the message of my articles has been coming in duplicates and triplicates after the 150^th article. I should say it here that I have a feeling that I may have said this before but you have to understand why I write these things before you can blame me for complaining about the same things over and over again. And yes! This is a complaint.

If you are not part of the Sunday team (the group of people that read Friday articles on Sundays), you have probably gotten a message that someone misses you by this hour. If you have not, you are not missing out a lot because 9 out of the 10 people that have gotten the message have received it from people who do not mean it. Over the years, I got curious about what people meant when they said they missed me. In what was a mini social experiment, I decided to be asking each and every person who claimed to miss me to tell me why exactly they missed me. Interestingly, many were unable to give me convincing answers while the few that were honest enough missed me for traits that I cannot be proud enough to mention in this piece. I will park this for now.

On one Friday sometime in 2019 I happened to be at work as usual. Rather unusually, however, I was away from my phone for a couple of hours. When I came back to it, there were a number of missed calls and many messages. Some of the messages were from some of you who always ask me for articles as if you pay for these services but the more interesting ones were from some young students I had met at a party the week before. Now… I am a reasonable man and if you invite me to a small gathering and tell me to bring a bottle, I will come with a bottle. That is a memo most people do not get so bringing a bottle becomes a symbol of status of sorts. That is what the people got and it got cemented when we decided to go out to some pub where I bought a round of drinks. We exchanged numbers and for some reason these people thought I was one direct pipeline from Castel Malawi to their cup… SO they sent their “mwasowa big” stupidities and went on to ask if I was buying them drinks. People can ignore you for the whole week and decide to say hi only when they need drinks, “buy one, get one free” pizzas and money for transport to wherever they want to have fun on the day. Ladies. How about those ones who only call when they would like to have sex? Am I overstepping?

Here is the thing then. I have always bubbled about how important conversations are in sustaining any meaningful relationship. The time I was starting to write this, I was in diner at Shoprite having breakfast with my dad who happened to drop by to hear how I was doing and to update me on what was going on with his life. The day before I had a one-hour chat with my boss who, after our team meeting just wanted to know how I was doing personally. I have friends and for most of them I try to make time to call or text just to check on how they are doing and I have people who check on me because some of us have understood that people need to interact as often as they need to interact and not as often as they need each other. The modern day society has two problems, though; we have people who are not able to hold normal conversations with friends and family and we have people who can only initiate the same when they are in desperate need (using this word because I have never seen anyone write “want” after “desperate”) of something.

Take the issue of not being able to sustain a normal conversation. I am sure you have those friends with whom conversations are limited to greetings and asking each other what each of you have consumed as the meal for the time. I am not saying that it is wrong, but that becomes boring and in the end the friendship dies a natural death. I personally am not good at sustaining friendships because being my friend can be intellectually demanding; I want to switch my stories from discussing who is the better comedian between Joe Roggan and Bill Burr through a review of Joe Biden’s policies to the previous weekend’s performance by Arsenal. It goes further from there. After 2 hours we need to debate on which one is better between the Mitsubishi X2 and the Marchetti SF-260 in a dogfight before we discuss why Adobe Audition is a better software than CuBase. At the end of the night we have to brainstorm on how we can use Python code to prove that the Collatz Conjecture is wrong. I know that I am extreme but if you can’t talk about that, then you should at least be able to discuss movies, politics, sports, career, literature or something of that sort on a level that can sustain a long chat. I think that is not too much to ask.

This whole thing of remembering our friends only when we have a serious need is also a big issue. While some may endure us whenever we just come guns blazing putting our emergencies and useless cravings on them, the tendency creates unhealthy relationships. Think of this. When a boxer is preparing for a fight, there is a wide range of equipment that is used in the training from weights and skipping ropes and whatever else they use there. There are two things that are used to strengthen the arms; the punching bag and a sparring partner. While both the sparring partner and the bag are punched, the major difference between a punching bag and a sparring partner is that a sparring partner punches back while the bag does not. I would like you to think of your friends as sparring partners and punching bags.

If you are to take it back to the day’s discussion, a punching bag would be the one with whom one cannot have and sustain meaningful conversations. A punching bag is that person who always comes to you for their needs while you hardly direct benefit from them. A sparring partner is, on the other hand able to sustain meaningful conversations while enriching you spiritually, academically, professionally, financially. Muziletsana.

I could go on and on with this but all I am doing is mourning the existence of meaningful conversations. Chatting used to be a thing before humans limited their interaction to small talk full of typos, immediate gratification, empty chit-chats and asking for favours.

The fellow from Lower Shire once said that being in the company of children is like being alone and having a conversation with them is like conversing alone. I will add to this that having conversation with people who do not know how to is worse than having a conversation with a toddler. Know why? When you are dealing with the latter you know what you are dealing with while the same is not the case for the former. Ladies and gentlemen. Join me, this weekend in cutting contact with people who never go beyond small talk and parasitism. It will save us a whole lot of trouble, time and money. 

Happy weekend!

Dedicated to my very good friend, Miss Palmer.