No Need to Polish It

There was probably a time when I couldn't have sat on a porch for an hour without feeling like I should be doing something. And even if I did sit there, I don't know that I was really sitting there. A car goes by. Who's driving it? What kind of car is it? Somebody walks past. Where are they going? What do they do? You notice the house, the clothes, the job, the things that tell you—at least you think they tell you—how somebody else is doing.

And somewhere in there, without necessarily realizing it, you're keeping score.
I don't think I do that nearly as much anymore. Not because I've figured everything out. Almost the opposite. I've lived long enough now to understand a little more about people. Not just myself. People.

Everyone is vulnerable. Everyone is human. Everyone has failings and frailties. The person who appears to have everything together has them. The person who is obviously struggling has them. So does the person in the nicer car, the bigger house, the better job.
Everybody has something they're proud of and something they wish they'd done differently. Everybody has been hurt. Everybody has disappointed somebody. Everybody has been disappointed.

And underneath a surprising amount of it, I think most of us have the same basic desire to be seen and appreciated. Knowing that has made the playing field feel a lot more even.
The person walking past isn't better than me or worse than me. More successful or less successful. They're just another person whose whole story I couldn't possibly know from where I'm sitting.

There's something peaceful about that. Maybe that's part of what makes it easier to just sit for a while. And when somebody else sits down, I've noticed something else. We get through the surface stuff a lot faster than we used to. The weather is fine. Traffic is traffic. We can cover all of that in about three minutes.

Then somebody says something real.
I've always been more of a listener. As I've gotten older, I've found a lot of joy - and usefulness - in giving somebody enough room to speak freely.

But I've also learned that sometimes I have to go first.
Not with some dramatic confession. Not by turning every conversation into therapy.
Just by saying something a little unpolished... Something honest.

I have become much less inclined to present a particular version of myself. And I've discovered that when I don't feel the need to present myself, the person sitting beside me often stops presenting themselves, too. If I don't polish what I say, they don't seem to feel the need to polish what they say. That's usually when the conversation gets interesting.

People really do want to talk about themselves - not because they're self-centered, necessarily, but because all of us have this whole collection of thoughts and experiences going around inside us. And when somebody seems genuinely interested, there's finally somewhere for some of it to go.

So you listen. You tell a story. They tell one. Something reminds you of something that happened twenty years ago. You laugh harder than the story probably deserves. You complain about something for five minutes and then forget all about it. Occasionally you solve problems nobody asked you to solve.
And every once in a while, somebody says something they probably didn't know they were going to say when they sat down.

Maybe that's what I've come to appreciate most. There's nowhere the conversation has to go. Nobody has to impress anybody. Nobody needs an answer. Nobody needs to have it all figured out.

And there's no need to polish it.