Some skills change lives. One of them, perhaps the most undervalued today, is knowing how to converse.

There is no pleasure more enriching than, after a long walk, an afternoon with friends by the warmth of a fireplace, talking about everything and nothing, crying and laughing about nothing and everything, letting your heart sing…

In this fast-paced society, where presence has become a luxury, having leisurely conversations without a utilitarian purpose is disappearing.

Conversation is an endangered art.

Substitution, copying, and image emerge in the dizzying spiral. We shorten words, replace glances with emoticons, and reduce communication to signals. Then we wonder about the reason for loneliness.

When conversation becomes a luxury, misunderstandings, suspicion, and distance grow. When it abounds, trust, collaboration, and inner peace flourish.

Talking is not conversing

Speaking is emitting sounds, words, or data. It’s exchanging messages without needing to meet. Conversing, on the other hand, is a profoundly human act. It demands presence, listening, intention, and eye contact. It requires an inner openness that no device can replace.

Animals howl and bark, yes, but they don’t converse ; they emit signals, they plead, they warn… but they don’t construct shared meaning.  They don’t reveal themselves.  There is no intimacy to share.

We humans create encounters. We create spaces where life becomes human, where lives—different, complex, unique—meet.

Talking isn’t enough.  Talking doesn’t commit us; conversing exposes us. That’s why we avoid deep conversation; it intimidates us. We don’t converse to win, nor to convince: we converse to reveal ourselves, to allow the other person to broaden our perspective, to make the other person’s world habitable and let our own become more human as well. When two people truly converse, even if they don’t change their minds, they rise to a higher level. They change their inner selves. Conversation is the humblest and most radical way of saying to the other person: “You exist for me.” And when someone feels that, life begins to heal.

Educating for conversation means teaching how to look, how to hold silence, how to direct gestures, how to enrich vocabulary… Through example…

This noisy, technologically invasive society threatens inner emptiness, robbing us of what should be revealed. It renders listening to the heart unnecessary, blending it with societal norms, confusing value with price.

In letters to the editor of a national newspaper:  “I look at my phone: yesterday, four hours and 24 minutes of use. I don’t remember doing anything truly important with that time. I just swiped, watched videos, read posts, jumped from one thing to another without even realizing it. Before, when there were no phones or internet, those hours were filled with life. People talked without interruption, read books calmly, wrote letters. There were afternoons for walks, games, learning. The hours didn’t evaporate; they were used. If I didn’t give away my time to screens, perhaps I would write more, play an instrument, have conversations without constantly glancing at my phone. Maybe I would allow myself to be bored and, in that emptiness, find new ideas. Time that’s gone never comes back. And every day, without realizing it, we let it be stolen from us.”

 (the infinite scroll)

Schools should cultivate conversational skills. Thinking, reading, understanding, interpreting, and speaking are competencies that shape our inner lives. Artistic activities—theater (crucial), music, literature—refine the heart and teach us to perceive nuances. Learning from the loves and sorrows of characters… And those nuances are the soul of conversation.

External signs also   communicate: a switched-off phone, a closed door, a well-chosen silence. Learning to manage them creates healthy environments.

Life as a chain of encounters

Life is built this way: from encounter to encounter, like someone crossing a river by hopping from stone to stone. The quality of these encounters determines the quality of our lives. Conversation is the tool that makes them possible.

The art of listening

There is no enrichment possible without the ability to listen. Listening to our surroundings, listening to others, listening to our inner selves, listening to God, listening to the characters in our books, our heroes; to the people we admire, to our teachers, and also listening to the silence… for all this, attention is necessary, sustained, unhurried attention…

Listening is a form of empathy, and empathy is a form of emotional intelligence.

By listening, we discover the world around us: smells, tastes, sounds… the music that plays around me.

An urgent invitation

In times of haste and loneliness, conversation is a vital necessity. Those who learn to converse gain inner freedom, deep relationships, fewer conflicts, and more peace. And they make the world they live in a better place.

Perhaps the first gesture is this:  turn off the screens, look up and let the other person in.

That’s where every true encounter begins. That’s where the rebuilding begins.

Listening requires personal skills and human virtues:  humility to create inner emptiness so that the other can find space within me; respect to avoid judgment and understanding for what is different; and the capacity for wonder and admiration for the beauty of others.

As Byung-chul Han says in his book “On God”

“Without profound attention, we cannot read God,” and I would add, without profound attention, we will never be able to read the other. “Empathy, like respect, is based on attention to the other. Society becomes brutalized when it loses that attention, and the lack of this kind of attention also generates an increase in violence”. “Emptiness is the inn that receives the other as they are, in their otherness, without interference or mixing of the self. For this, it is sufficient, but indispensable, to know how to direct a certain gaze toward our neighbor. This gaze is, above all, attentive; a gaze in which the soul empties itself of all its own content to receive the being it is looking at, just as they are, in all their truth. Only those who are capable of attention are capable of this”.

“What saves us is our gaze”

(Simone Weil)

“LOVE IS THE GAZE OF THE SOUL”

The gaze of the soul is the love of God made concrete in HIS GRACE