I had hallucinated part of a conversation that taught me how I could stop smoking.
I was taught to shut down conversations that veered in the direction of dying.
He wrote that he would occasionally seek the older man's advice in brief telephone conversations, which taught him that "underneath the history that has been made, there is a human being".
From my practice of deep inner silence, I wondered 'What can I do to engage people in a conversation that would inform, empower, and teach us?' What would deepen our personal strength, in light of a political debate focused on the strength of others?
And of course, the mega-blissful do not have conversations; they teach lessons.
It was that conversation that began 11 years of teaching about the Vietnam War, first to high school students and later to their parents.
"The challenge is to change the conversation around teaching so that it becomes the career that you want your child to go into," said Kathy Payne, senior director of education leadership at State Farm, "rather than the career that you counsel children out of".
I thought of Lewis Carroll's Alice: " 'What is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversation?' " Stories teach us how to read our own lives, but pictures, too, lead us toward the lives that could be our own.
It is my favourite place because the two-way conversations teach me to think differently about the numbers I look at every day on my laptop, and encourage me to to explain things without relying on jargon and terminology that only a tiny fraction of people have any hope of understanding.
This isn't something a few conversations can suddenly teach.
