A Sport That Everyone Can Play

And it keeps us on our toes

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

We recently had guests over for three consecutive dinners because it is the Jewish holiday of Sukkoth, and as part of the holiday, we invite friends into our Sukkah (which looks like a hut) and eat a meal together.

It is tiring to cook, serve, and entertain on consecutive nights, but I have some very interesting takeaways that will serve my husband and me well as we embrace our years ahead.

Conversation is a sport.

We need to expand what we consider exercise.

I have spent my last thirty years playing tennis, though now my knees have suggested I play less, and I have listened. I’ve replaced much of that time with walking a dog, going to the gym, and practicing an attitude of “acceptance” when my body sometimes acts like an old car.

Years ago, my mom counseled me that the old car gets to set the rules, and I’ve listened.

After the holiday and three full evenings of conversation, I realized that I hadn’t been seeing the full value of dynamic interaction among friends. A good conversation uses carefully selected topics, thought, humor if done well, and listening. There are many skills involved. The best part is that conversation can be very energizing. Everyone left our sukkah with more pep in their step.

I made a few smart decisions that helped, as explained below.

I avoided hot topics that are mood downers

It’s important to pick a subject that won’t make people feel sad or full of self-pity. This means no discussing,

• The millionaire in the neighborhood and the silly way he made his fortune.

• Gen Z or Gen Alpha (born between 2010 and 2024), many of whom seem lost and forlorn and are not interested in hearing from the adults in their lives

• The difficulty in receiving medical attention and the challenges inherent in the “Epic” medical system, which is the standard platform used to communicate our needs.

• U.S. politics, where having a conversation about approaches to intractable problems (examples include immigration, inflation, and good jobs in an AI-dominated world) is harder than Einsteinian physics.

The topics that worked well in spurring positive conversation

If you are over sixty, I can recommend three topics, two of which are fairly positive, and one is a shoutout to reality.

Retirement: Crossing the age-sixty threshold often makes one wonder, “How much longer should I work?” At 65, I realized that I needed to morph my path sooner than I thought because it was getting less fun to sell my services to thirty-somethings who would rather employ colleagues.

Once you start on the topic of retirement, it is hard to leave it because everyone has a thought or a question, and we all learn something while unloading some angst.

House purging: We have more stuff than we wish, and we can’t give it to our kids. Bebe Nicholson recently wrote about the fact that our kids don’t want our things. My husband and I are not moving anytime soon, so technically, I don’t need to be thinking about this, but I am. I’ve stopped buying clothes or cute nicknacks for the house, but that just means I’m serious. The damage of too many possessions has already been done.

At the mere mention of this topic, one can expect either advice or commiseration. The advice used to come with a recommendation for Marie Kondo’s book, which suggested we evaluate a specific possession in terms of whether it sparks joy. Today, the big read is Linnea Gustafsson’s book, Swedish Death Cleaning. We are supposed to have our kids in mind as we work to purge and make their job easier down the road.

The only problem with a house-purging conversation is that in the middle of it, you feel the need to get started cleaning, which isn’t very social.

Our bodies/ our minds: My group of friends is still in fairly good shape, but everyone can cite something that doesn’t work as well. I mentioned my knees. For some, it’s their hearing. For others, they write more notes so as not to forget critical to-dos.

This third topic can leave one dispirited, but the upside is that we all experience some version of aging, and sharing that fact can be comforting. Many of my friends have adopted “tricks” to keep their minds active — from taking courses to playing games like Bridge or Mahjong to doing Wordle and other mental gymnastics to even finding modest part-time work.

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There are many other conversations that can yield energy in a group — sports, religion, streaming picks, and entertainment — but the main discovery for me is that, in general, conversation, in the right amount, is a balm for the soul. It meets many needs, both social and spiritual, and it exercises our gray matter, too.

Now, if you are skeptical about considering conversation as exercise, then you can combine walking and talking as a complete solution that exercises all muscles — mind and body.

For me, “conversation” can be filed in that folder whose label reads, “Some of the best things in life are free,” or in the words of writer Sylvia Plath,

“Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me.”

I will continue to enjoy my quiet time, as I’ve written about, but in the words of Sylvia Path, I’m also going to be collecting more raw material.