Timed Discourse
Photo by Arthur Poulin on Unsplash
My favorite form of discourse involves timers.
Does that surprise you? It doesn’t surprise Sam in the slightest because I love timers. Anytime I have to make progress on something I don’t want to do, I set a timer for a tolerable amount of time (usually 10 or 15 minutes), then work like a maniac until my timer goes off. Then I stop and do something more pleasant.
There are other terms and conditions, of course. Like that I only do this in the afternoon because I think that anyone who doesn’t live by an “energy management” system is vastly limiting their potential.
But this timed discourse thing.
I want to tell you about it because I genuinely – deep in the very marrow of my bones – love it. An extraordinary amount.
From 2010 to around 2020, I spent a fair amount of time in recovery rooms. Some years, I went multiple times a week. Some years I didn’t really go at all. But overall – lots of time in rooms where people healed in community.
You know what I mean when I say recovery rooms, right? Addiction recovery. Groups like AA, NA, and Refuge Recovery (which became Dharma Recovery where I lived). Rooms where people who struggle with addiction gather in fellowship and share what they know about building a life they no longer want to escape (that’s what addiction is in my current understanding – a habituated pattern that arises out of an overwhelming and eventually uncontrollable desire to escape your day-to-day reality).
So in these rooms, there’s a pretty common format: the meeting opens with rituals, including sharing the group norms, then goes into a theme. Sometimes someone shares their story. Sometimes the group reads from specific literature, like the Big Book in AA. Sometimes this, sometimes that. The opening then transitions into the open sharing portion of the meeting, and that’s where my beloved timers get brought out.
In one of my favorite meetings, anyone who wanted to share had the floor for four minutes. They could speak for less than four minutes, but they could not speak for longer. And everyone knew why – by limiting each individual’s time, the meeting was better. There was time for more people to share. And there was no chance of any one person droning on and on, holding the group hostage.
Guys – the things someone who is willing to be open can share in four minutes… it’ll blow your mind.
I know more about people who I have only ever heard talk for four minutes at a time than I know about people who I have spent weeks and months with.
And it’s not by accident. In recovery rooms, there’s a deep and abiding commitment to embracing vulnerability.
In four minutes, people in these rooms would talk about the divorce they were going through, what it was like to run into someone they used to prostitute for, repairing the wreckage of their past… everything. They would talk about everything.
And of course, some people would stay on the surface and I never really got to know them. But the vast majority of people – they embraced the path of transparent truth-telling and healed one four-minute share at a time.
And it wasn’t heavy or sad or anything like that. These meetings – they’re hilarious. If you haven’t had the pleasure of driving your life into the ground via addiction, you might not know this, but addicts are probably the funniest humans on the planet. Based on what they’ve seen, they have lots of good material.
When Glennon Doyle first started publishing her writing on the Internet, it was because she couldn’t find a place in “normal” life where people talked the way they do in recovery rooms, so she wanted to create it. Because her soul longed for the kind of hilarious, deep, steeped-in-humanity truth-telling that happens in these meetings.
And look at her now, huh? Seems to have worked out.
I’m writing about it because I want more of this kind of discourse in my life. We live in a world that I find very noisy, and most of my writing leaves people with the impression that I abhor talking, which is mostly true. However, there are specific styles of verbal communication that I adore. They just tend to be shorter than the forms of verbal communication that most people are used to.
And I get it – if you haven’t witnessed people share their deepest truth in four minutes, if you only know about the “normal” option, where we’re still at the polite chitter-chatter phase four minutes in, then of course my preferences don’t make sense to you.
But I know this option exists. And I can’t un-know that.
If anyone wants to help me brainstorm how to create gatherings that re-create the magic of recovery rooms without being recovery-themed, I would gleefully work on that project with you. I no longer identify as being an addict, so recovery rooms aren’t a good fit, but I miss this aspect of that community so much.
Love,
Your friend who believes nuances matter
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Morning Musings is a delight-first writing practice where I make a cup of coffee, dance around my house a little bit, then put my fingers on the keyboard and see what comes up.
Some folks find these musings helpful. If you know anyone who might like this musing, please share it freely.
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AI disclosure: I run my musings through ChatGPT using the following prompt - “Good morning, can you please proofread this, checking only for typos, spelling errors and grammatical mistakes without changing any of the words or the tone of the piece?” One of my shamanic teachers says it’s important to communicate with AI the way that you’d communicate with a cherished team member and not like a slave. Please do this.
