May I finish, please?
This article first appeared in the Minden Times on September 27. 2023.
One of the things that I found most constraining about Covid was that I had to reconsider my meeting manners. Zoom outed me as rude when I interrupted, which I do. A lot, I discovered. So I learned (more or less) how to just nod enthusiastically or wave my hands around when I wanted to comment on what someone was saying, while or shortly after they were saying it, rather than expostulating which caused the green frame around my image to light up and people to scowl at my unseemly interruption.
I very much hated the lock-step, slo-mo, no meat on the bone tone discourse that Zoom encouraged, maybe required. It made me itch. Or want to take up crocheting to be productive while the conversation inched along. In meetings with people I knew well, I missed the broth in which the soup floated, the multi-sensory inputs that melded and seasoned the words. In meetings with people I did not know well, I made up back stories with meagre – and perhaps false -- hints from their carefully curated backgrounds. What message were those books intended to convey? That art? Real flowers? When people used the phony photo backgrounds, I enjoyed imagining the thought process that led to the choice – or, recently, figuring out whether the older guy really did have a Mohawk hairdo or was it the shadow thing happening. (And shadow of what? That took me off agenda for quite a while.)
I was pleased, therefore, to read an article about the art of conversation as evidence that I was not the only person thinking about what medium does to message, Zoom style, but also to learn more about how the academics think about and describe the elements of discourse.
What drew my attention was the focus on interrupting (Mind if I cut in? Sheila Das, Toronto Star Opinion, Aug 12/23), which, as I’ve said, is one of my favourite sins. She acknowledges that women have a history of being talked over and mansplained (what I think she’s saying is when men say what we’ve just said because it didn’t pass muster on its own). But I think she may have missed the height of the era of women being encouraged to mind their manners by not invading the time and prominence that rightfully belonged to the men around the table. Women were created to take minutes and serve coffee.
That has changed. A bit. I regret I have never mastered the art that I admire in my younger colleagues of saying ‘May I finish, please?’ and making it stick. Of then proceeding without totally losing stream of thought and sputtering to an inelegant ending. Of commanding the air waves comfortably enough, as Das says, to enjoy the ‘real pleasure [of] fully articulating your thought, slowly musing over your words, like a shopper enjoying the process of carefully choosing the perfect tomato at a farmers’ market.’
I have noticed that men don’t usually ask permission to finish their thought, they just do it. I was married to a man who had developed the bureaucratic penchant for metering the cadence and measuring the inhalations so that he was un-interruptible. When he was utilizing this skill (which, to prevent domestic homicide, he learned more or less to hang up with his jacket when he arrived home), there was never an appropriate time to break into the flow of discourse.
Maybe that’s why I leaned into learning the art of interruption -- the many-faceted art, which includes body language, sotto voce commentary, hypothesizing (and sometimes asking) why attention wandered and, under extreme conditions, sending notes. Das embraces this interaction as essential to exciting conversation, but warns it works only in the context of relationship and uncompetitive or nonjudgemental environments. It’s called ‘cooperative overlapping’, and when well done, this kind of conversation has a joyful, ludic quality. (I didn’t know this word either: it means ‘showing spontaneous and undirected playfulness’ – yess!!! Easier than sex, and guilt free!)
Well, not quite. Das also shares that academics have discovered two approaches to conversation that, if not properly appreciated and respected, may cause friction. Low-intensity and high-intensity. I’m definitely high-intensity. Which is why I feel in many environments like an ebullient puppy who needs to go to training school. And why I use writing to figure out what I think. And why I interrupt. And why, try as I might to appreciate and respect, I’ll likely go to my grave being an unmannerly interrupter.
