No. 023: I Want to Know What You Think about the Weather.

On the value of small talk.

On Saturday Miss Betty brought us a carrot cake. The previous evening, our family had returned home from an errand at the same time she was taking her routine stroll up and down our little, dead-end street. We rolled down our minivan window to say hello, and she asked whether we’d be home the next day. When my husband told her we would, she pointed at him and smiled: “Well then, I’m finally going to make you that carrot cake!”

Betty was the original occupant of her house after it was built over sixty years ago. She lived there when the house that’s now ours served as the parsonage for the Methodist church up the road, and she has lived there to witness subdivision after McMansion-subdivision spring up around us, even as our quiet street has stayed mostly the same.

Soon after we moved in five months ago she asked us which flavor of cake we preferred—chocolate or carrot. We told her we liked both, and a couple weeks later I looked out the window to see her walking up our driveway, chocolate cake in tow. But if you’re good at making two kinds of cake, I suppose you’d want a turn in the spotlight for each, so now a two-layer carrot cake with cream cheese frosting and walnut embellishments sits beneath a dome on our kitchen counter.

I don’t yet know much about Miss Betty, and she doesn’t know much about me. However, it so happens that she often takes her evening strolls at the same time I’m returning from my evening runs. I sprint the final stretch up the hill on the sidewalk beside the main road, and as soon as I reach our street I come to a halt, walking the rest of the way to our house, huffing and sweating, with my hands braced around the back of my head.

“Look at you go!” says Miss Betty when our paths cross. “I would drop dead if I tried that!”

I laugh, “Well, at least you’re out here doing something—moving your body and getting some fresh air. I think that’s what counts!”

We pause in the middle of the street and exchange “How are you”s, smiling and chatting for a couple minutes about the changing seasons before waving goodbye and ambling on toward our respective homes.

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Small talk—I’m sure I mustn’t tell you—these days has quite the unsavory reputation. It’s awkward, tedious, pointless, superficial, and exhausting, many will say.¹ Fascinating things, complicated things, and no shortage of horrifying things are happening all around us, and when our minds run rampant with complex deliberations on the big things such as these, it can feel shallow at best, or wasteful at worst, to spend time reciting the rote conversational liturgies of the day.

As a result, the self-identified character trait of “despising small talk” has by now become something of a badge of honor, supposedly indicating the intellectual vigor or emotional depth of its subject. “Great minds discuss ideas,” so goes the Eleanor Roosevelt quote; “average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”

I get where this claim is coming from: We would certainly miss out on enjoying many of our God-given social faculties if our relationships consisted only of gossip or thoughts about the weather. The ability to talk through nuances, complexities, mysteries, and contradictions attached to a diversity of ideas adds richness and respect to any friendship, and I’d like to imagine much of our eternity in the new creation will be spent engrossed in deep conversation.

I do, however, believe we’re missing out on something marvelous when we eschew small talk as a tired and useless convention of days past. Maybe it’s because I was born and raised in the American South, so warm and lighthearted conversation is my native tongue. But I’d like to think there’s more to it than that.

Several years ago, when we still lived in Kentucky and I was in the throes of my struggle with severe, treatment-resistant depression, I routinely made small talk with a different Miss Betty—one who, along with her husband Ben, always sat beside us in our go-to church pew on Sunday mornings. My Kentucky Betty was a few generations older than me, just like my Georgia Betty, but instead of talking about the seasons, we primarily talked about fashion. She would exclaim her admiration of my cobalt high heels, bemoaning that she could no longer wear such shoes comfortably. In return, I would remark upon the joyful dazzle of her sequined blazer.

I always looked forward to my church-pew chats with my Kentucky Betty. During a season of my life when most of my waking hours were spent head underwater, gnawing at the knots in a densely tangled net of dejection and confusion, the chance to put on a smile and exchange pleasant thoughts on another person’s wardrobe felt like coming up for air. It made me feel human, even if only for a minute. While I struggled to see a hopeful path forward in my own emotional life, I clung to the hope I could see in this woman who, I was sure, had lived a long life complete with many difficulties and pains, but who nonetheless could show up to church every Sunday in sequins and a smile.

Whether because of depression, social anxiety, lack of experience, or any other factor, small talk is at times the only type of talk other people feel comfortable or competent to offer us. And when we reject it, we are in a sense rejecting them. We are commodifying their words for the sake of our personal stimulation. But humans—and the words that they speak—are not commodities. They are miracles, image-bearers of a loving God who delights in them without regard to anything they can offer him.

To engage in small talk charitably is to exercise one’s humility and joy over and against a world that would prefer to see us enslaved to our pride and anxiety, and would pit us against our neighbor in polemical competition. It is an admission that in the grand scope of things, we are ultimately small people, whose greatest ideas and most eloquent arguments will someday wither like grass in the heat of God’s glory. It is a declaration that people—all people, regardless of intellect, experience, or charisma—are worthy of attention and connection. This declaration, after all, is the root of all hospitality; and if we cannot be entrusted with hospitality’s root, how will we participate in its fruit?

Maybe in time I’ll get to know my Georgia Betty on a deeper level. Maybe I’ll end up walking to her house every Friday morning for tea and cookies, and I’ll listen to her tell stories of her loves and losses. Maybe I’ll go to her for advice on how to raise children through the teenage years, or I’ll learn something of her theology and we’ll debate the merits of various theories of atonement. I realize all this would make the story of our friendship more interesting.

But just because we can’t capitalize on a friendship for the sake of an interesting story doesn’t mean the friendship isn’t yet worthwhile. Even if all I ever learn about Betty is what she thinks about the weather, I’ll still be grateful for the occasions she gave me a reason to smile. There is blessing in every interaction we have with another human, regardless of the degree to which it inspires or entertains us—and hey, sometimes there’s even cake.

1. All the above unfavorable descriptors, among others, appeared in the results when I Googled “the problem with small talk.”