What we’re talking about...

“All we ever talk about are the same things,” said a friend. “It’s the pandemic, politics, gun violence, racism, culture wars, immigration — none of it any fun. We used to have so many more things to talk about.”

I thought about this for a long while. Certainly, it is true that over this past year, we’ve done a lot of complaining, worrying and comparing notes on these subjects, hopefully with people who don’t push our buttons any more than they’ve already been pushed. And if those buttons have gotten stuck, hopefully we can apply some WD-40 to pop them out again.

But I beg to differ. We talked about lots of other things too.

We talked about the books we read, the series we watched, the movies we streamed, the baking we did, the projects we completed around the house — fixing and painting and gardening — stuff that had been staring us in the face and we finally saw it.

We talked about the new courses we finally had time to take, the new creative projects we began, the new bikes or weights or walking sneakers we ordered online to take the place of the gym.

We talked about digging deeper to find the light in the darkness, about finding old friends who popped into our hearts when our minds were quiet, about our love/hate relationship with Zoom, our love/hate relationship with the people in our houses, our love/hate relationship with food, always too present.

We talked about our great appreciation of sweatpants, the realization how much time is wasted shopping, how often we spend effort on people who don’t float our boat, how much work we seem to get done at home, and if that’s a good or bad thing. We talked about the changes we made — maybe in how we talk to our mates or our kids or how much we realize we need each other, want to help each other.

I saw a quote: “Before you clean, you have to see the dirt.”

Lots of us have seen the dirt, literally and figuratively.

We talked about how much time we spent outdoors and how much we need that, how much more self-directed we’ve become, how much more introverted we are than we thought, or how much more extroverted.

With things easing up, we’re now talking about what good has come from this year, what sustenance we want to grab — like takeout that doesn’t get all eaten up — before the floodgates open and we become immersed, once again, in our full-throttle lives.

We’re talking about how we don’t know if we want to go back to what we had before.

We’re talking about what we’ve learned, and what we realize we want to learn. We’re talking about being afraid we’ll miss the quiet time, even as we can’t wait for it to end. We’re talking about finding more balance as we go forward.

We’re yakking about the things we used to think of as fun, wondering if they actually are. We’re wondering if they’re really distractions, timewasters, an empty sort of busyness, and we don’t want to do them anymore.

Sure, maybe the Pandora’s box unlocked this year gave us a slew of topics we’d rather stop talking about. And yet, we realize, this past year has unleashed a cornucopia of other topics — even good, helpful, socially uplifting topics that could actually invite the change we crave.

One of the things I finally did this year was read War and Peace. Speaking of the book,

Mark Twain supposedly said, “Tolstoy carelessly neglects to include a boat race.” That means everything else you can think of is in there.

Maybe there’s a lot we couldn’t talk about this year — our exciting travels, live theater, big concerts and parties — but certainly the mega-topics that consumed our conversations have touched on pretty much everything else you can think of, maybe more than ever.

But yes, we haven’t talked about a boat race. Personally, I can’t wait.