One of the things that seem to happen a lot during spiritual awakening, is losing interest in all kinds of normal human endeavors and preferences.

Some people stop caring about previous passions and beloved hobbies.

Others might stop reading newspapers or watching tv.

And for many humans in this fascinating situation or process, their day-to-day conversations can become a real struggle.

When the person you thought you were becomes less of a big deal, the same can happen to your opinions and many of the things that occupied your worldview before, and had to be strengthened or even defended constantly.

It’s very normal to feel a growing aversion towards chitchat.

And that can be quite impractical and confusing.

In my case, after a couple of big revelations and insights, it took at least half a year before I could have a somewhat ‘normal’ conversation again, probably longer.

This was partially because I stopped giving a shit about most of the ordinary watercooler topics (not my choice, by the way), and partially because I felt like being from a different planet, and this change had somewhat extended to my brain.

One of the consequences was that I forgot many, many things.

A lot of the tiny factoids we carry around to spice up basic human interactions and fill the gaps that make us feel awkward, were now gone or unreachable, and I had no way to replace them yet.

Many times I simply didn’t know what to say, or how to respond, so I just kept silent.

Pretty awkward, at first.

Eventually, though, the capacity to talk about generic stuff came back, which gave me extra options, but I also started to like a new way of having most of my chats.

Because what I’ve seen is that not being able (or not wanting) to engage in the more ‘superficial’ conversations, doesn’t have to be a problem.

Talking from personal experience, again, this problem has solved itself gracefully.

I love, love, LOVE to talk about the mysteries of life and things like happiness and joy and thoughts and mental challenges, and how it’s possible that we can have completely different experiences while doing the exact same things.

Many people love this too.

Many people really like to know about this stuff, because it’s just fascinating and mysterious.

A lot of people like to discuss the mechanics of life.

And most people in the world love it when you go beyond the basic, polite, and safe shit that makes up the majority of the chats, especially face-to-face.

What you could call ‘deep stuff’ is highly fascinating to many creatures out there, so bringing it up and creating a space to talk about it, is often much appreciated.

And since I also don’t have a problem with being open about feelings and emotions and the destructive things I went through in my past, this adds to the sense of talking about meaningful stuff, and it appears to be quite inviting.

Nowadays, whenever I go to a meeting or a party or an activity that involves multiple people, I almost always end up somewhere in a corner talking about life and its miracles with one person or a bunch of them.

I’m perfectly capable of playing it safe at the beginning of an encounter, I can chit-chat if I want to, and sometimes it’s even fun to do so, but most of the meetups I have with new or old friends have a value they didn’t have before.

It’s not about seriousness, it’s not about philosophy, and it’s not about scoring points on some invisible scale of sharing interesting knowledge.

I guess it’s about opening up, and sharing what we have in common.

But it mostly just feels good.

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(Photo by @jurigianfra, for Unsplash)