Almost everybody despises small talk. And almost all people look at small talk as that one routine thing in the world that is forced upon them to be able to socialize in gruesome circumstances and be miserable while they do. And despite popular opinion, I think small talk is wonderful. 

Like, full of wonders. 

Because, for me, small talk is the door through which we enter into bigger, and philosophically engaging conversations. Small talk is a sort of test: 

If I can turn around the conversation and make it more interesting, tie it into a topic that pulls in references from various cultural paradigms, then we won't only talk about the weather but about our fascination with clouds. From clouds, we will move on to that TED talk we both watched about a cloud appreciation society. And that society will open up into a discussion about photography, we will compare our cameras and our favorite photographers, and we will discuss style and contrast and shadows and from there we will move on to that episode of Supernatural where a shadow was the only characteristic of a creature the Winchester brothers could see. Would we like to be supernatural hunters, save people? We will argue about ethics and morals and then we will resolve our differences, we will learn about each other and we will learn about the world around us. 

Because a few minutes of small talk can lead to hours of intellectual debates and impassioned discussions. And that is how we discover our soul mates.*

*I am qualifying soulmate as someone whom I am on the same page with but not on the same sentence. We write different paragraphs, and complete each other's thoughts. [I am inspired by a fellow blogger for the definition.]

Lots of stamps, 

~Belle