Interested train ride

I have left the house wearing the wrong coat. Are my shoes letting in water, or is it just that my feet are cold? What should I do about the annoying email I received this morning? How do I make a Google doc available offline? Why is writing still so difficult? What would life be like if writing were easy? This is what I do when I don’t know what to do – I just start, continue, and wait for a little flicker of interest. I’m not waiting for you to be interested, dear reader. For now, sitting here on a slow train to London, I’m just trying to interest myself. Hang on, let’s be precise here: I’m just being interested.

There’s a big difference between being interested and being interesting. The former is about the quality of one’s engagement with life. The latter is about performance and ego. The leap of faith here is that if I find something that I’m interested in, and follow that thread, I will discover something – and if I share it, some spark of connection might happen. It might not. But it might. And that’s enough.

If I try to be interesting… well, I notice my shoulders tightening and my heart slumping just at the thought. I find myself sucked out of the flow of what I’m doing, distracted by unanswerable questions and unhelpful assumptions about whatever some kind of ‘audience’ or other might want or need or value. That said, if you find this interesting, I’d be delighted. And this is an intriguing paradox: my refusal to worry about you, enables me to connect with you, for us to connect with each other – at least it tips the scales in our favour.

I hadn’t thought of it like that before. For this relationship to work, you need to trust me – sure – but, also, I need to trust you. I’m not sure what it is about you that I need to trust. But I don’t mind the uncertainty. I like the mystery. Maybe it’s as simple – and as complex – as trusting in your humanity?

Much to my surprise, I can feel a link emerging to the writing I do for clients. Here the audience is – or should be – front and centre. I’ve spent over 30 years asking questions like Who are we writing for? What do they care about? Why does this matter to them? Useful questions, for sure. And they relate to both the head and the heart. But what about asking something like What can we trust them to know? or What if we trusted them more?

That line of enquiry is implicit now in a lot of the work I do, but perhaps there’s value in bringing it to the surface? I want to add especially as AI shapes more of our business communications, because that feels important. The communications that flow through my awareness are increasingly not just mediated by machines but made by machines. What does that do to human connection? That’s a big question. Another one. Too many and too big for this train ride. But I am interested – and from there, other journeys are possible.

Featured image is a photo of a train window via Unsplash.