This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.

Here's our source for this week:

One of the main symptoms of a bad conversation is this: one of the participants is on autopilot.

Imagine you're on a date. Feeling insecure, you've brought along a set of index cards. You know: "7pm Inquire re childhood memories", "7.15pm Praise her outfit"... We really want the date to go well. But every time we glance down at our index cards, this is felt by our date as disengagement. And she's right: we're leaving her out of the process. Our anxiety has made us crave a method, when what the situation demanded was some moment-to-moment responsiveness to what was actually happening (to the true energy of the conversation) ... We prepare those cards and bring them along and keep awkwardly consulting them when we should be looking deeply into our date's eyes, because we don't believe that, devoid of a plan, we have enough to offer ...

Some conversations feel evasive, ill-considered, agenda-laced, selfish; others feel intense, urgent, generous, truthful. What's the difference? Well, I'd say it's presence. Are we there or not? Is the person across the table there (to us), or not?

Photo by Sunguk Kim on Unsplash