The Extra
Five Minutes

You can usually tell when someone has stopped listening. The eyes remain in place, but something behind them has moved on. Perhaps the person is thinking about the next appointment. Maybe the phone vibrated. Maybe the answer has already been decided and the rest of the conversation has become a formality. We have all done it, and most of us have also experienced the peculiar loneliness of talking to someone who is waiting for us to finish.

The difference between hearing and listening has been discussed so often that the words themselves have become tired. We tell people to be better listeners. We learn to make eye contact. We put the phone down and try to look interested. Then somebody starts telling us a story we've heard before, takes too long getting to the point, or begins explaining something when we have somewhere else to be. That is when listening stops being an idea and begins costing something.

Real conversation can be terribly inefficient. People rarely present what matters in a convenient form. They circle it, include details that appear irrelevant, start somewhere in the middle, correct themselves, and sometimes talk about one thing while deciding whether it is safe to mention another. The important sentence may arrive after we think the conversation should have ended.

I remember a phone call years ago from someone who wanted to talk about a fishing trip. That's what the call was, for the first ten minutes. Weather, a boat that needed a new motor, a lake he wanted to try in the spring. I had things to do and kept the conversation moving along the way you do, offering the short answers that signal you're still there without inviting anything longer. Then there was a pause, longer than the others, and he said something like, “Anyway, the doctor called me back yesterday.” That was the actual reason for the call. The fishing trip had been the ten minutes it took him to work up to it.

That creates a problem in a world organized around speed. We want the point. “What do you need?” “What happened?” “What's the problem?” These are reasonable questions and sometimes necessary ones. But people don't always know the answer when they begin talking. Occasionally they discover what they were trying to say while saying it.

I have always been interested in the moment when an apparently ordinary conversation changes direction. There is a pause. The person almost leaves, or perhaps looks down, and then says, “There's something else.” Three words can reveal that everything before them was preparation. The first part of the conversation may have been the person deciding whether the listener was really there.

Phones have made partial listening easier to hide and, at the same time, easier to detect. A glance downward used to be rare enough to notice immediately. Now it's routine enough that we've had to invent new tells for real attention: phone face-down, phone in another room, phone silenced and left untouched for the length of an actual conversation. The gesture has become almost formal, a small ceremony people perform to prove they intend to listen, which says something about how much doubt there usually is on the other side of the table.

We tend to think time is what we give when we listen, but attention may matter more. Five minutes offered impatiently can feel longer than twenty given freely. People usually know when they are consuming time that hasn't really been offered. We communicate it without saying anything. We look at the clock, begin gathering papers, glance toward the door, or say “right” at increasingly short intervals. Our body leaves while our feet remain in the room.

Most people recognize the signal and stop talking. We may never know what sentence would have come next. Usually nothing important is lost. The coworker may only have wanted to complain about traffic. The teenager may have been wandering through a story with no destination. The older relative may indeed be telling us something for the third time. Every conversation cannot become an unlimited claim on another person's time.

But occasionally the apparently unimportant conversation is carrying something underneath it: a worry, an apology, a question someone is embarrassed to ask, a problem that has become difficult to carry alone. People don't always begin with the heaviest thing. Sometimes they need to know whether the bridge will hold before they put any weight on it.

I think this is why some people are so much easier to talk to than others, and it usually has nothing to do with what they say back. It's that they don't seem to be waiting. They ask the second question instead of moving on after the first. They let a silence sit for a moment instead of filling it. None of this takes any particular skill. It mostly takes the willingness to stay a little longer than the conversation technically requires.

Children seem to notice this before anyone teaches them the vocabulary for it. A four-year-old will ask the same question three times in slightly different words, not because he didn't hear the answer, but because the answer arrived while you were doing something else and he can tell. Kids don't have the manners yet to work around a distracted adult, so they simply repeat themselves, sometimes louder, until they either get the attention or give up. Watching this happen at a dinner table is a fairly efficient way to learn what your own listening actually looks like from the outside, since a four-year-old will announce his findings without any of the diplomacy an adult would use.

That doesn't mean we should stop everything whenever someone wants our attention. Life has obligations. Work has deadlines. Families need us elsewhere. Sometimes we genuinely have to leave. Honesty may be better than the performance of listening. “I have to go in five minutes, but I'm listening.” Or, “I can't give this the attention it deserves right now. Can we talk tonight?” People can usually work with the truth. What is harder is realizing they have been speaking to an empty room occupied by another person.

Listening is a habit that erodes under pressure and rebuilds with practice. The people who seem best at it aren't necessarily patient by nature. They've simply decided that most conversations deserve one more question before they end.

There are days when five minutes is expensive. There are also days when we spend five minutes on things we cannot remember an hour later. We rarely know in advance which conversation will matter. Every now and then, someone standing in front of us is deciding whether to say, “There's something else.” We don't have to give everyone the rest of the afternoon. Sometimes we only need to avoid leaving before they do.

The man with the fishing trip, as it turned out, was fine. The news wasn't as bad as the pause before he told me suggested it might be. But I've thought about that call more than most conversations I've had, mostly because of how close I came to hurrying him past it. Ten minutes about a boat motor doesn't sound like anything worth protecting. It's only afterward that you find out what it was actually for.