Conversations in the Rain

It’s been a busy day of driving and hay-bucking here in Ireland. I was off to the local corporate office early this morning to film a short interview with a staff research scientist. There was ice on the windshield and puddled water every 250m or so along the way. Suffice it to say, it was an adventure, one Irish backroad at a time.

I have a certain level of joy in conversing with the unassuming. These people move mountains behind the scenes and are usually the unsung heroes of our progress, either in innovation discoveries or corporate growth. They’re seldom the people who claim the credit; you can be assured that the loudest voices of any corporate shills have done little to move the needle for progress. Instead, it’s the quiet and unassuming those given over to the research into the various collisions between technology, our society, and the inevitability of our human state. These people merit the conversations and consideration, not the Wall Street fat cats who bleat out stale contrivances at beck and call.

The older I get in this industry I’ve called my own, the more I understand this hypothesis to be true. It’s an acknowledgment that innovation comes through novel conversations. The fireside chats in a pub have more momentum than the three gray-carpeted cubicle walls of the corporate mausoleum. But I digress. This is because conversations, in whatever shape or form, carry the weight of everything with them, and it can’t be understated.

From a quick interview to a more languid discussion of Land Rovers, car restorations, and the gluten-free bakery on the way back to the farm, the morning passed quickly. The steady pounding of rain gave way to the dim gray overcast sky with a permeating chill that comes with a more humid environment like Ireland.

As I rushed from the car park to the bakery to grab a gluten-free treat for Emma, I was reminded that conversations always require mutually interested parties. We convey meaning through even the shortest, clipped phrases that we use. Looking at my chat history with Emma, not everything is said in complete sentences. Many of our exchanges have devolved (or evolved?) into quick emoji reactions designed to elicit the responses that move our conversations along. Not every word needs to be spoken, but context becomes critical to our understanding. If anything, our conversations evolve daily, taking on new life given new encounters, circumstances, and considerations but always finding their rootedness in the days prior.

Coming home, it was off to move hay into the barn. Our local supplier arrived in due course, his van and trailer laden with the dry hay the horses and donkeys need. It, too, became a conversation, an embarkation into the composition of the hay, the smell, the texture, the weight, and the loose or tight bales as they went from truck to hand to stack. Wrapped up in this exchange was the sudden appearance of another person there to purchase the trailer from our hay guy, having found out we were in his neck of the woods. It’s funny how a barnyard became a place of both conversation and commerce.

Story after story, woven together in a wild assembly of colour and contrast. From buyer to seller, purveyor to recipient, human to donkey and horse, the fibers of our stories are wrapped together into one heady ball of fabric. Under the drenching gray skies of an Irish day, the air chilling us through coats and gloves, we brought meaningfulness and purpose to a day where we’d rather have stayed inside.

The day isn’t done as I write this. For every bit of progress we’ve made in our chores and tasks, there’s always more to be done. There are videos to edit, photos to inspect, cats to take to the vet, donkeys and horses to feed, and assembled minutiae to sift and sort through. But, for all the busyness, today was full of the conversations that matter, the moments that ground us in our humanity.

I hope you find those conversations in your daily encounters and that you, too, find joy in connecting. Who knows where the roads of life will take you, but one thing is for sure: You’ll always have interesting and unassuming people to weave stories with.

May it ever be so.