Lovely thoughts on conversations, especially with those you’ve known for a long time. Rhymes with Good Conversations Have Doorknobs.

And I was thinking, actually, about conversations between my wife and me. I was thinking, more precisely, about conversational “space.” We are two whole universes connected, anchored by very deep connection, but there are a thousand books worth of experiences that belong to one of us alone. You spend 17 years together and we know the easy paths to each other. They are well-marked, assiduously maintained, no poison ivy. But how much more are all of us — are the hillsides — than the well-worn trails?

Every person on this earth is a monstrously huge landscape, and yet, we can drop into any of it with a simple incantation, the right string of words piped through this sparse interface. At a bus stop, taking in two dogs playing, paying for a muffin—you might unveil a secret path to walk for a year or just a few feet. I have been blessed with my mother’s gift of easy connection to others. But what is the nature of that gift? It’s saying: hey, that seems interesting, wanna go there? As simple as stepping off the trail to point out a mushroom.

Anything can open up a hillside to explore. But often, it is the components of conversations that open up the rest of me: an unexpected question, someone else’s lingering shower thought, a feral conjecture about the world, free empathy, a true thing offered, a scrambled memory reassembled in real time.