Could you begin your next conversation from an unusual notion?

We could sit back and hope that a conversation moves into the new, and surprises us with those reverberations Hillman mentions. Hoping isn’t good enough.

All good conversation has some element of surprise because it’s interesting when we discover something new; it doesn’t matter whether it’s new information, a new experience, or a new perspective. Unfortunately, newness alone isn’t enough to raise our conversations from good to great. For that, we need a certain sort of new.

Not just any talk is conversation, not any talk raises consciousness. A subject can be talked to death, a person talked to sleep. Good conversation has an edge: it opens your eyes to something, quickens your ears. And good conversation reverberates: it keeps on talking in your mind later in the day; the next day, you find yourself still conversing with what was said. That reverberation afterwards is the very raising of consciousness; your mind’s been moved. You are at another level with your reflections.

~ James Hillman from We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse

We cannot be certain our conversations will have any of those Hillman-edges. All we know if where they won’t be found: in the mundane, in the boring, and in the trivial. (And we don’t naively want an antagonistic conversation that explodes; Those aren’t the sort of edges we want.)

We could sit back and hope that a conversation moves into the new, and surprises us with those reverberations Hillman mentions. Hoping isn’t good enough.

Alternatively, we could try to steer our conversation to find those edges. That can work well, but it’s difficult to be both deeply into a conversation and to be mindfully steering a conversation.

Instead, what if we intentionally began our conversations from an unusual notion? Take the known—the topics you expect, the conversation partner you expect—and intentionally start with something unexpected.

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