There is a moment, suspended between question and answer, where possibility resides. I had a mentor who said “that’s the moment intelligence leaves your gut and travels to your ass”—and he’d place the palm of his hand on his forehead when saying this. It’s the instant before certainty collapses into words, when it could still be anything. Physicists speak of quantum superposition: particles existing in all states until observed. Conversations have their own quantum mechanics, as I’ve previously explored.

We systematically destroy these fertile moments. Barely has someone finished speaking, sometimes not even that, and we’re already responding. As if silence were a dangerous vacuum we abhor. Could that precise nothingness be the place where the most interesting ideas form, that liminal space between the said, the thought, and the yet-to-be-said?

One of the motives for this, I’ve observed, is the never-ending competition we live in. We compete for attention, for being present, for being seen, for the most likes/hearts/stars, for a better salary, for that promotion, for being funny, interesting, meaningful. This everlasting competing state makes us defensive because the stakes are always perceived as high. Loss and victory are increasingly absolute states. Conversation doesn’t have to be absolute. In fact, the better and most important conversations are always relative and open space for more relativity.

This competitive urgency shows itself in how we handle conversational silence. I remember a conversation with a psychoanalyst who had the disconcerting habit of leaving long silences after I spoke. They weren’t strategic pauses or therapeutic techniques; they were genuine spaces for digestion, as if words needed time to settle before deserving response. It was one of those persons who short-circuits our internal references for turn-taking, silence enduring, question and comment building timings. This person forced the creation of such liminal space and time.

There are situations, on the other hand, that show us there’s too much space and time between turns. It’s as if the participants know that conversation has the power to create and to destroy. This gets me back to etymology. Yes, I know, everyone does this nowadays. And yes, I’m repeating myself. Bear with me, dear reader: conversation literally means, in the original Latin, “to turn to each other, together”. If we turn to each other, together, we might be preparing to fight or to embrace. Fighting, discussion, can be a powerful deterrent for a meaningful and necessary conversation. That’s another kind of competition we’d wish to avoid, if the stakes are important enough. Those are the moments when one would wish to use conversation to build, but is frightened they might destroy rather than create. It always revolves around meaning. Creating new meanings implies destroying old ones, cherished or not.

In any case, time in a conversation isn’t linear. Time curves in the presence of gravity and in conversations it curves in the presence of meaning. Five minutes of superficial chat drag like hours. An hour of genuine dialogue passes like moments. It’s as if we create temporal bubbles where normal laws of duration don’t apply.

But we live obsessed with communicational efficiency. Agendas, key points, actionable items, tasks, hurrying to the next appointment. We’ve transformed conversation into transaction, forgetting that the best conversations are those whose outcome you can’t predict. Or rather, that go to places we didn’t know we wanted to visit. They’re semi-controlled drifts, navigations without maps—or maps that reveal themselves only in the travelling.

In this post-modern, post-profound world, the more we try to optimize communication, the less we communicate. Meetings become theater, emails unilateral dissertations, instant messages an illusion of dialogue and connection. We’ve created all the tools to converse and forgotten the art of conversation itself.

We need to relearn the physics of genuine conversations. To understand that, as in relativity, there’s no neutral observation point. Each participant alters the conversational field with their presence. That uncertainty isn’t a problem to solve but the very condition that allows discovery. That silence isn’t absence but the medium where words gain weight and density, but only if it’s not a pathway to avoidance.