My father has a particular way of being in a room with another person that I have, in the last few years, started to recognize as a kind of fluency the contemporary world no longer has the conditions to teach. I do not mean this in a romantic or nostalgic way. I mean it in a specific structural way, and I want to try to describe it carefully, because I think the description matters for anyone who is currently in their thirties or forties and wondering why their conversations sometimes feel thinner than they think they should.
The fluency is the capacity to give and receive undivided attention. I have written around the edges of this before. I want to come back to it here, because I have been watching my father at seventy and thinking about what he has access to that I, at thirty-eight, do not.
What my father has access to is not a skill in the conventional sense. He did not, at any point, decide to develop it. He did not, as far as I am aware, ever frame it to himself as a capacity. The fluency is, on close examination, a feature of his nervous system that was installed before he was twenty, by the simple structural fact that the only kind of conversations available to him during those years were undivided ones. The installation was free. The conditions for the installation are gone.
What my father’s childhood actually had
I want to describe this concretely, because the abstract version sounds nostalgic in a way that misses the structural point.
My father grew up in a London suburb in the 1950s and 1960s. The household had one telephone, which lived on a small table in the hall. The telephone was used, in most weeks, perhaps three or four times, for matters that warranted the call. When it rang, someone in the family walked to the hall and answered it. The conversation that followed had the full attention of both parties. There was nothing for either of them to scroll. There was nothing for either of them to glance at. The conversation was the only thing happening, on both ends, for the duration of its happening.
Conversations in person had the same structure. My father walked to school with friends. The walks took twenty minutes. Across those twenty minutes, the boys talked. The talking was not interrupted. There were no pockets being checked. There were no notifications being managed. The boys talked, or they walked in silence, and the silences were also fine. Nobody felt the need to fill them.
I want to dwell on the silences, because they are, in some real way, the most important feature of what I am trying to describe. My father, in conversations with me, is comfortable with silence in a way that I find difficult to match. He can be in a room with another person and not say anything for several minutes, and the not-saying does not produce, in him, any visible tension. The silence is just, in his experience, what the conversation is doing at that moment. The conversation has not, by the silence, broken. The conversation is continuing, in the form of two people being in the same room without speaking. When something needs to be said, one of them will say it. Until then, the room is simply the room.
This capacity for silence is, on close examination, the byproduct of having been in many such silences in childhood. The capacity is not a personality trait. It is, more accurately, a structural feature of a nervous system that learned, before it was twenty, that silence in another person’s presence is not a problem to be solved.
What the contemporary nervous system has been trained for instead
The contemporary nervous system, including mine, has been trained for almost the opposite condition. The conditions of contemporary adult life are conditions of near-continuous available stimulation. The phone, even when not actively being used, is in the pocket. The pocket is, in some real way, a small ongoing weight in the cognitive field. The body knows the pocket is there. The body knows the phone is in it. The body is, by some default it cannot easily override, partially configured to monitor the phone for what might be happening on it, even when the phone is in airplane mode.
This means that even when a contemporary adult is in conversation with another person, the attention being directed at the other person is, in any given moment, a fraction of the total attention available. The other parts of the attention are configured for monitoring the various other channels that, in the contemporary environment, are always potentially active. The fraction directed at the conversation is, on average, smaller than the fraction the older generation can direct at a conversation by default. The smaller fraction is not a moral failing. It is the structural condition of having a nervous system trained for an environment that did not exist when my father was learning what conversations are.
This is why silence, for contemporary adults, is uncomfortable in a way that it is not, for the older generation. A silence in a contemporary conversation is, on some level, the moment in which the nervous system, no longer occupied by the conversation, becomes available for the monitoring of the various other channels. The body, accordingly, becomes restless. The restlessness is not consciously experienced as a desire to check the phone. It is experienced, more vaguely, as the sense that the silence is awkward and should be filled. The filling is not, on close examination, about the conversation. It is about the nervous system’s discomfort with being in a state that it has not been trained to inhabit.
My father’s nervous system was trained, by twenty years of unhurried conversations, to inhabit silence comfortably. Mine was not. I can, with effort, simulate the comfort. I can sit in a room with my father, and not check my phone for half an hour, and produce, on the outside, a passable version of the kind of silence he is having. What I am doing internally, however, is not the same as what he is doing internally. I am performing the surface feature of the capacity. He is operating from the underlying condition.
What this looks like, in practice
I had lunch with my father in London in February, on the most recent of his visits to Bangkok. We were at a small Thai place near my apartment. The lunch lasted about an hour and a half. During the lunch, neither of us looked at a phone. We talked about various things. We did not talk during the parts when we were eating. Those parts were quiet. The whole lunch was, by the standard of my usual lunches, conducted in a register I almost never operate in.
I noticed, at one point, that I was working harder than I usually work, in lunches, to produce the kind of presence the lunch was asking for. The working was not unpleasant. It was just visible to me. I was monitoring myself. I was checking, periodically, whether I was being adequately present. The checking was the work. The work is, in itself, the small ongoing tax that the contemporary nervous system pays whenever it tries to operate in the older register.
My father, sitting across from me, was not doing any of this work. He was eating his pad see ew. He was looking at the street. He was, when I said something, listening to what I said. The listening was not, for him, a special effort. The listening was simply what his attention defaulted to. When the silences came, he did not, in any visible way, register them as silences. He registered them as the parts of the lunch when neither of us happened to be talking. The not-talking was, in his experience, not a thing that needed to be addressed.
This is, I now think, the practical shape of the fluency I am describing. It is not the dramatic feature of any particular conversation. It is, more accurately, the absence of a particular kind of cognitive overhead that I have, by my upbringing, been required to carry into every conversation of my adult life. My father does not carry the overhead. He is free, accordingly, to direct his full attention at whatever is currently in front of him. The freedom is invisible from outside. It is, on close examination, what other people experience as the particular quality of presence the older generation has and the younger one does not quite manage.
The honest part, which is harder
The honest part of this article, which I want to make sure I do not skip, is the acknowledgment that the fluency my father has, and that I do not, is probably not fully recoverable for me. The wiring was laid down before he was twenty. My wiring was laid down in a different environment, by parents who were already adapting to the early forms of the contemporary attention economy, by schools that were starting to introduce computers, by a culture that was, in my adolescence, beginning to install the configurations that have, by my late thirties, become the norm. The conditions for installing the older fluency were already partially gone by the time I was a child. They are now entirely gone for children born in the last twenty years.
What is available to me, more modestly, is the deliberate construction of small periods in which the contemporary overhead can be temporarily reduced. Lunches without the phone. Walks without the phone. The occasional evening at home, alone, without any device producing notifications. These periods do not, by themselves, install the older fluency. They do, however, allow my nervous system to spend some time in conditions closer to the ones that produced the fluency, and the time, over months and years, slowly produces, in me, a partial approximation of what my father has by default.
The approximation is partial. The approximation is not the same as what the older generation has. The approximation is, however, considerably better than the alternative, which is to spend the rest of my life in the default contemporary configuration and to never quite find out what it would have been like to be in a conversation with the kind of presence my father, without trying, brings into every room he enters.
This is, in some real way, one of the more important inheritances I have received from him. Not the practical inheritances. The demonstrated example of what a particular kind of attention looks like, in operation, in a person who learned it before twenty and has been carrying it for the fifty years since. The example is, in its quiet way, the thing I am most trying to learn from him. I will not, in all likelihood, fully learn it. I will, with effort, learn enough of it that my own future conversations are, in some small way, closer to the kind he has been having all his life. That is, in my honest accounting, what most of the rest of my work in this domain is going to consist of. The conditions for the original installation are gone. The deliberate approximation is what is available. The approximation is, in the end, worth the work.
