Three Steps to Turn Everyday Get-Together(s) into Transformative Gatherings:A Ted Talk by Priya Parker

The following are excerpts that I wrote between 2013 and 2015, some of which were included in my novel, Between Transitions.

I skated through my twenties on the precipice of a series of "very nearly": I very nearly kept good jobs, and I very nearly nurtured good relationships, and I very nearly became the person that—somewhere inside me inching its way to the rise, and very nearly surfacing for air—I knew I was capable of being. There are glimpses of that person, they are probably too few and too subtle for anyone other than myself to have noticed, nevertheless I know he’s there, because I’ve seen him, and sometimes he and I meet at the purview of the precipice that never comes to be. I was thirty when I moved back home. Everything about it felt familiar. The two old houses nestled artfully surrounded by a nursed backwoods just out of sight of the dead end road. The small, German town secluded in obscurity, still lush with a small-town kindred, and the rolling river near the town center. It was exactly as I remembered it, everything, that is, save me.

I have had a guard up now for over a year, and I’m not sure how to get around it. Living with this kind of a demur is not something that I have acclimated to yet, and honestly I’m not sure that I ever will, so obviously I am having trouble getting around it; and, respectively, I open up only when queried, and even then it’s not really all that meaningful. I tried to work through it, literally, by throwing myself into my work:

Until recently I read and reviewed independently published books for a journal based in California, a job that I loved but couldn’t maintain with my growing list of projects, since my move back to Texas. I also write short stories with the intent of their publication in literary journals. I fell into the work many years ago while living in a small town in Idaho. I worked, for a short time, in a potato processing plant, maintaining a packaging machine from 8:00PM to 8:00AM, every day, and all week. The plant closed one weekend for Easter, and I drove the fifty miles to the nearest, largest town and spent the day, and ultimately the weekend in a coffeehouse near the Snake river. I wrote about it; a travelogue, if you will, and left it for the café owners. When they saw me again they asked me to publish it in the local monthly magazine - which I did, and I have been writing professionally ever since. I tried to write a novel shortly after I started writing for Idaho Falls Magazine, although it was considerably more challenging than I expected, and I ultimately chopped it up and rewrote the chapters to sell as short stories, hence my transition into short fiction. I haven’t even considered working on another novel until recently, when I moved back to Texas. And I’ve been writing it now for a month, or so. It’s surprising how much more straightforward the process has been this time around. I guess working as both a writer and a reader for a number of years makes a substantial difference. 

I have learned that I write better when I’m surrounded by people, in public places, when I can feel the different energies of people that wander in and out of the café throughout the day. I’ll often engage in conversation with people, which can be counterproductive, considering it takes away from my writing time, but when I set aside, hide in the corner of the coffeehouse, and allow my thoughts to spill onto the page like an overflow of expression pouring out and onto the surface, I can feel both the complement of the people surrounding me and the recognition of myself, in the moment. As I reflect on the story later—and perhaps even years later, as an old man—I’ll remember always the feeling, the only thing routinely lost in retrospect.

I buried myself again in my writing, this time immersing myself into it entirely. Overthinking the situation I was more concerned that switching off that conversation, and reengaging with someone else would be overtly insulting, so, instead, I focused entirely upon my own expression of thought. Although, it felt, suddenly, as if an ominous wind had swept over me, a wind that had not affected anyone else in the café, except for me.

Instantly I became overwhelmed with a desire to know and to do nothing. I continued to sit, still, in the coffeehouse, my body seemed unaffected, although a fog had enveloped my mind, infiltrating my limbic system and paralyzing my emotions. I felt nothing, and yet I was consumed by a hopelessness. Feeling the nothing transgressed both my soul and my intellect; prescribing feeling nothing to a prospect of a meditative nothingness—actively thinking nothing, as if nothing could be objectively contemplated. I stared only, ahead. Occasionally I would turn and attempt to create stories about the people surrounding me. This, however, would turn out to be an exercise in futility. I gave up only to give the impression that I was watching people, in order to give the impression of normalcy. I believe that our routines, our lives—are made possible, or just, and more discerningly—easier, knowing that we are connected to everything, and to everyone; many people ignore, or have forgotten that idea simply because it is commonplace, and when a new standard replaces an old the new one will, eventually, become so normal that the old will seem peculiar. Depression occurs when our connection is severed. Depressives have a unique, albeit unfortunate, relationship with the network that our consciousness is hardwired to, because only depressives are capable of recognizing both the affiliation to, and the separation of that connection. Antidepressants increase the biological component, the serotonin, which bridges the corporeal with the ethereal.

Though Provoking June 6, 2019

Three Steps to Turn Everyday Get-Together(s) into Transformative Gatherings