After a weekend of getting together with friends to share food and drink, I am reminded at how wonderful it is to converse and how little we seemingly get to do it. We talk all day, but conversation? That is a different activity.

Good conversation can be structured but unstructured conversation can be just as rewarding. The biggest barrier to conversing is the constraint of time. Often we’re in a hurry to get on to another meeting or event, so we compress our interactions in either the superficial or the utilitarian.

As important as goals and objectives can be, we all need to make time to converse, first with family members and friends and then with colleagues and customers. We discover new things about those we converse with and the world we share, and we demonstrate how much we value those we converse with by sharing our most limited resource of time.

We could all benefit from the revival of conversation.