Grab Your Monkey-Wrench and Let’s Disrupt the Conversation
“In times of widespread chaos and confusion, it has been the duty of more advanced human beings--artists, scientists, clowns and philosophers--to create order. In times such as ours, however, when there is too much order, too much management, too much programming and control, it becomes the duty of superior men and women to fling their favorite monkey wrenches into the machinery.” ~ Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Conversation Activism 101: For your next conversation, bring a monkey wrench.
Our Conversation Activism workshop tagline is: When you change the conversation, you change the world. Doesn’t that sound nice? After all, who doesn’t want the world to change?
Yet, one of the basic human dilemmas is that we love change as much as we hate it. Change creates novelty and novelty can be refreshing, exciting, energizing – erotic. Change can also feel uncomfortable, scary, and downright threatening. It’s complicated. Either way, change is disruptive.
“When you disrupt the conversation you disrupt the world” – doesn’t have the same gentle ring to it. “Change” is a good word for marketing but when it comes to doing the work of Conversation Activism, “change” is disruption wearing a bowtie. So rip that bowtie off and roll up those sleeves! Hand me that monkey wrench — hands are going to get greasy!
Arguably some conversations are fine the way they are. These might be conversations that are more cut-and-dried or transactional. They tend to be more functional, serving a specific purpose and getting the job done.
However, we humans are seldom that simple. We show up to our conversations with lots of baggage. With emotions, feelings, wants and desires, all of which can change moment by moment, so right off the bat, we are way beyond the carry-on limit – caught standing in an ecosystem of conversation that also includes nuanced context, meaning, history and relationship. To navigate this complexity we rely on numerous strategies including falling back on patterns and habits. We call upon opinions, judgements, and assumptions. This is the nature of conversation and while these strategies can be helpful, they can also lead us into conversational atrophy – conversations that dead-end in smalltalk or avoidance or conversations lined with expectations or dripping with cultural learnings and bias. The conversation gets stuck and sometimes we don’t even know we’re stuck.
“Stuck” might look like having the same old conversation (or argument) over and over again. Or avoiding things we need to or want to talk about. Or desiring a shift in a relationship including more depth, more meaning or simply getting past small talk.
In our Conversation Activist workshops our disruption work starts with the monkey wrench of longing and desire. What are the longings and desires that permeate our lives? What do we really long for in our conversations? What really matters when it comes to creating meaningful and lasting connection?
Our longing runs deep and our desire runs wild. Both desire and longing are important in keeping the conversation moving but they’re very different. In the context of conversation as ecosystem, desire is more proximal and immediate. Our curiosity pulls us moment to moment in the immediacy of the flow of conversation. Longing is more pervasive. It permeates the ecosystem including the soil and the horizon. We sometimes judge desires and especially longings to be somehow unacceptable. They might feel silly, impractical, shameful, or embarrassing. In our vulnerability we might deem them too big on the one hand or menial and unimportant on the other. We might consider ourselves undeserving or on the other end of the spectrum we might express them as demands.
These are the longings and desires not to be placated by commodified consumerism. Big Gulps, Coach bags, and excursions to the Caribbean have no place here. Dig deeper beneath the material bling into the radical realm of heart and soul. Francis Weller, psychotherapist, writer, and soul activist, speaks of these as “primary satisfactions”.
Primary satisfactions are the activities that have been hardwired into humans over millenia. He states these are those things from which we receive true nourishment. Things like “being members of a community, gathering around the fire, hearing the stories of the elders, feeling supported during times of loss and grief, offering gratitude, singing together, and sharing meals at night and our dreams in the morning”. We all recognize and deeply long for this soul nourishment and rarely receive it. In the absence of primary satisfactions Weller states that we opt for secondary satisfactions - things like rank, privilege, wealth, status, and on the shadow side, addictions. These things we can never get enough of because they fail to truly nourish. Weller states if we were to begin to actually address our primary satisfactions, the entire consumer economy would collapse overnight. Now that’s disruption!
Putting our Primary Satisfactions first in conversation, puts a monkey-wrench in our passive state of acceptance and calls us into the realm of doing something different. Our humanity becomes something nurtured by doing and practicing rather than buying and possessing. For us, Conversation is the very territory to bring us face-to-face with our primary satisfactions and into the practice of our common humanity.
We have an exercise we introduce in our workshops aptly called Uncovering Longing. It’s a simple exercise that encourages participants to dig down and explore their longing. Every time we do this exercise the quiet in the room thickens and grows deep. Time slows. Tears flow. For those willing and daring enough to share their longing, the realization that we are not alone in our longing becomes viscous and alive. This is what i call a threshold exercise. It initiates a movement shifting from ordinary to sacred time and space. It leads our workshop participants to the next question which is: Given your longing, how might you be able to bring more of what you long for into your gatherings and conversations? And this is where we realize that meeting our longing face-to-face requires disruption. Because to make those shifts means facing the personal and cultural patterns that keep us on the surface of life.
A Systems View of Conversation
Disruption is a bursting forth, a shattering of patterns, a shift in flow in the way things were and the way things are. A disruption is a call to pay attention or to awaken. But shifts in the conversation don’t just happen, they require an act that is simultaneously disruptive, courageous and compassionate. This is why we call it Conversation Activism. In Conversation Activism we take a systems view of conversation. A conversation is a small social system that threads relationship and reflects culture. Just like the living systems of organisms or an ecological system or a larger social system (such as a community), a conversation is a system in the sense that it’s an integrated whole whose properties cannot be reduced to those of smaller parts. And just like any system, a conversation responds to disruptions in its own, self-organizing way.
For example when one person leaves or joins a conversation the conversation becomes a different conversation. The leaving or joining may be gentle or abrupt. The original participants each register their own internal response which might be expressed in innumerable ways. This disruption of plus-one or minus-one influences rather than controls the conversation. There’s no hard and fast rule as to how the conversation is to change — the conversation may break down or it may break through shifting to a new state of order.
In addition, there’s far more happening in the non-verbal realm than we are able to notice. These are the subtle disruptions happening on levels detectable by body and heart to which we often respond and react intuitively and unknowingly. This is like when you glance at someone and they catch your glance and glance away and then you glance away. This little ping-pongy dance happens in a millisecond and we often move on without giving it another thought but these things are happening all the time. Not every little wayward disruption is significant or meaningful but when we practice attuning ourselves to these very subtle ripples we can begin to get a feeling for when and how to play in the dance following a wayward current or pulling on a thread hanging in midair.
In this way each conversation has its own degree of intelligence in how it responds. It can’t be controlled — it can only be influenced. Its response depends on who’s present, as well as time and place. Robin Wall Kimmerer talks of systems and systemic transformation as requiring a mix of incremental change and disruption of the status quo. Incremental change is the work of the Conversation Activist. As Conversation Activists we bring more awareness to our participation in conversation and can choose to disrupt the conversation with the intent of influencing it to shift. When we disrupt the patterns of any conversation whether they be ingrained, habitual, or unconscious, we open the horizon to alter the path of the current conversation and as a consequence, every subsequent conversation.
Many years ago i was participating in a regularly occurring men’s group. There was one man in the circle who drove me nuts. He rambled on and on and never seemed to get to the point. The group decorum was about letting each man speak in his time with no commenting or crosstalk. My frustration meter was pinned off the charts. One day i tried something different. I somehow got it into my head that maybe this guy was never going to “get to the point” the way i would have done it, and if that’s the case, what might he really be trying to say? I dropped my expectations and released my demands and to my astonishment, i felt i was actually hearing him for the first time. I was inwardly more calm. I was able to listen more attentively. And what i heard was still rambly but it kind of made more sense. Over time, his shares seemed to become shorter and more coherent (or was it just me?). I do know that in our after-group hang at the local diner i went from tolerating his presence to enjoying our evolving connection. Our new connection began with me disrupting how i listen rather than me insisting upon or imposing my own way of communicating.
These small shifts change the balance of the conversation’s ecosystem. Whether you toss a pebble or hurl a boulder into a lake, you create ripples. Conversations are no different – anything you say or do, no matter how seemingly innocuous, creates ripples. You say something, you say nothing. You look askance, you look someone in the eye. You join, leave, pay attention, space out. laugh, cry all create ripples some of which the consequences are significant and some indiscernible. They’re ripples nonetheless and ripples are disruptions.
Why does this matter?
First, anything you say or do in conversation has an impact (that is, creates ripples or a disruption. Acknowledging this and bringing more awareness to it opens the possibility for us taking more agency and responsibility in our conversations.
Secondly, implicated within this view is that conversation is not an isolated instance. Conversations affect our relationships going forward and backward. One way of understanding this is that the arc of a relationship could be defined by a long series of conversations that ebb and flow across time bringing us closer or driving us apart. The questions we do or don’t ask, what we do or don’t hear that reinforce our understanding and beliefs about the world. And in this way when you change the conversation you change the world.
Having this kind of deep and detailed awareness is both empowering and daunting. You could call it the Miranda Rule of conversation – anything you say or do can and will have an impact.
In order to navigate this awareness, you need to embrace ambiguity and know you aren’t fully in control – a feat in our certainty-obsessed culture. Just know embracing ambiguity requires courage, curiosity, and compassion. Know that the conversation is bigger than you and you don’t have complete control as to how your contribution (or monkey wrench) impacts the conversation. This is where play comes in! Muster the courage to try something new, call upon curiosity to see what happens, have compassion for yourself when it doesn’t land and let yourself foster compassion for others. And be honest and when appropriate, willing to apologize– because sometimes you try something, the monkey wrench slips, and someone gets hurt. Have fun, letting disruption guide and inform you in the wilds of conversation and with time learn to use it wisely as a means of channeling, responding and contributing to deeper more meaningful conversations in your life.
Because when you change the conversation, you change the world.