Volume CXXXII, Number 4 October 4, 2002 f

Conversation and communion
GENEVIEVE CREEDON
COLUMNIST

"Is it me," my friend asked the other day, "or are people less friendly this year than they were last year?" I don't really have an answer to that question. Generally speaking, one of Bowdoin's virtues is that it is filled with friendly people.

I was once told last year that sophomore year is the hump in college, because it is characterized by this in-between state of everything no longer being new, and by getting ready to go abroad. I don't know if disenchantment is the right word for that state, but it is what I felt when I walked into the dining hall for my first meal back here. Everything was the same.

I don't really know that I had expected anything to change. I hadn't really thought about it. But it was one of those "Oh, my God, I'm here. Again." moments. And it really isn't that people are less friendly. It is that I'm tired of the superficiality and artificiality of the generic "What's up? How are you?" conversations that unequivocally fail to move me in any way. I wouldn't even call those encounters conversations except that they are practically the only way we choose to interact with each other.

A conversation is an exchange. It is a force. It is a gift, and it is one of the biggest voids in this community. We don't have time for it, or we don't have the energy to invest in it. And we don't even know how much that loss imposes upon us, how much it drains us.

Last night, I listened to a friend describe what he calls the "warm fuzzies" as that moment when you are entirely conscious of someone doing something for you that they don't have to be doing: at the super market, when someone bags your groceries, at a shoe store when the salesman laces your shoes, in the Union when you drop a book and someone picks it up for you. As he described the "warm fuzzies," I watched him smile, invested in the possibilities that other people have to change our lives.

And I smiled. I'm still smiling, in fact, because that moment was a "warm fuzzy" for me. That exchange, that interaction, that moment held more power than most of what I have lived in the past month, because it was genuine; it was real, and it was so simple.

In a world in which we are always striving for bigger and better, the most fundamentally human interaction, the most overlooked and forgotten moments of connection and communion sustain us in ways we are too busy to notice, too driven to believe in, too shy or too conditioned to know how to ask for.

I don't know how to change the way we live, so that we have to stop and see the treasury of the possibilities. I don't know how to make you believe what I've just written, except that I know that the only existing perfection is momentary, and it depends entirely on our ability to connect, to converse, to commune with each other in the most basically human ways we know.