The best conversations are those conversations with friends, for it is only with friends – true friends – that we can enjoy life for what it is. Analogously, the best conversations are those conversations focused not on rhetorical skill or domineering bursts of logic, but rather on a jointly-accepted obedience to the true things, desire for the good things, and the enjoyment of the beautiful things. In these true conversations between these true friends, there is a mutual surrender to the other.
Unfortunately, what keeps us from these conversations, from these communal acts of creation, meditation, contemplation, or reflection, is almost always the fear that if we truly do forget ourselves, that we would lose ourselves. However, forgetting ourselves is precisely the nature of true bliss because forgetting ourselves is precisely the nature of true love: losing ourselves in that which is greater than ourselves. The great paradox of relationality, of authentic human living, is that man is most himself when he is most forgetful of himself.
"For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it." – The Gospel of St. Matthew, Chapter 16, Verse 25
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