Something Beautiful

Conversations are like sculpting.

I like to think of myself as a very logical person, someone for whom every idea falls nicely in line with the one before it. I feel like there is more value in logic than emotion, and I pride myself on my ability to think and speak clearly.

I wonder how much God’s time is spent laughing at me. For all my self-proclaimed logic, I feel things very deeply. I even think in feelings!

It may sound like a joke, but when I think, my brain connects inherently to the feelings. It’s like a filing system in my head that is based around feelings; discussions about teaching get filed under joy, anxiety, and angst. Thoughts about Jesus can be found by searching for confusion, love, anger, or angst. My family? Affection, hopelessness, and angst. Basically, there’s a lot of angst.

But I’ve always had this idea about conversations. I’ve thought for the longest time that good conversations are like baking. You make sure all the collaborators are on the same page, and then you add ingredients one at a time, with everyone working towards the same expected result. It makes so much sense for everyone to stop wasting time and just follow the recipe. In baking, the only way to get anything worth eating is to follow a recipe.

Or is it?

I recently read a study that said that people who procrastinate moderately are more creative than those who do not procrastinate at all. The hypothesis is that when you procrastinate, you give your brain more time to process through multiple solutions to a problem- more solutions than you would normally have time to brainstorm. The idea is that you give your brain time to think its way, not just to the solution, but around the solution, looking at it from every angle so as to find the best solution. What if our conversations could be the same way?

Imagine a conversation where everyone has different points of view and shares them, one on top of another. Depending on who you are, it could sound like a dream. To me, it used to sound like a nightmare. Now, I think it sounds like progress.

I’ve decided that a good conversation isn’t like baking; it’s like sculpting. You start with a lump of material, and none of the sculptors are entirely sure how it’s going to end up. Slowly, however, each sculptor contributes something, an idea or point of view that makes the end result more clear. But it only works when each person takes a turn whittling away the excess. It only works if everyone is willing to layer ideas upon each other, not in a straight line. There is no anticipated outcome at the beginning. And being on the same page? The co-contributors are often reading entirely different books! But if you are willing to engage the material, to scrape away the excess, you may uncover something unexpectedly  beautiful in the end.