What Happens When We Make Time to Talk

A few days ago, I was listening to an old Bengali song, “Coffee Houser Sei Addata Aaj Aar Nei”—roughly, “That Adda at the Coffee House Is No More.” I have heard the song many times, but this time, sitting thousands of miles away from Bangladesh, it took me back many years. I remembered the long afternoons and evenings I once spent with friends, talking without looking at the clock. We talked about politics, books, movies, people we knew, things we wanted to do and things that probably did not matter at all. One subject would lead to another. Nobody had an agenda. Nobody asked what we had accomplished at the end. We called it adda.

It is difficult to find an exact English word for adda. “Conversation” comes close; so do “chat” and “gossip”. But none of them quite captures what the word means to me. An adda can begin anywhere and go almost anywhere. A conversation about a book may turn into politics, then food, then an old memory, then an argument about something completely different. Someone may speak a lot. Someone else may mostly listen. There may be laughter, disagreement and long pauses. Sometimes the conversation ends without settling anything. Perhaps what I remember most is the feeling that we had time.

Looking back, I realize how unusual that feeling has become. I am no longer the person who could spend an afternoon talking without thinking about what needed to be done next. Life changes. Responsibilities grow. And university life in the United States has made me particularly conscious of time. At NDSU, like at most universities, our days are organized around schedules. Classes begin and end at specific times. Meetings come with agendas. We have office hours, assignments, conferences, workshops and deadlines. Students move from one class to another, often checking their phones or laptops along the way. Faculty and graduate students move between teaching, research, meetings and other responsibilities. Even when we say, “We should get coffee sometime,” the next question is often: “When are you free?” There is nothing wrong with this. A university could not function without schedules. I have also found many warm and welcoming spaces at NDSU where people gather simply to enjoy one another’s company. Recently, for example, I received an invitation from the English Graduate Organization for a potluck in the English Lounge. The invitation asked people to stop by anytime during a two-hour period for “food, fun and conversation.” Bring a dish if you can, it said, but just stopping by is welcome too. Something about that invitation made me think again about adda.

A department potluck is not Bengali adda, of course. Adda comes from a particular cultural and social history, and I do not want to call every informal gathering an adda. Still, the invitation contained something familiar: come, sit, eat, talk and spend some time with other people. You do not need to present anything. You do not need to arrive with an argument. You do not have to produce something before you leave. And yet the invitation also made me think about what I sometimes miss in campus life.

NDSU gives us many opportunities to meet people. We have student organizations, departmental events, workshops, receptions, clubs and other gatherings. What seems harder to find is something less organized: the habit of simply staying. What happens after a class when nobody immediately leaves? What happens when a conversation over coffee continues longer than expected? What happens when someone tells a story that takes us away from the subject we thought we were discussing? What happens when we sit with people without worrying too much about where the conversation is going? Sometimes, nothing remarkable happens. And perhaps that is part of the point.

Not every conversation has to produce an idea, solve a problem or lead to something we can put on a résumé. We spend so much of university life thinking about outcomes: grades, credits, publications, degrees, jobs and careers. These things matter. But relationships rarely develop according to an agenda. Friendship does not usually begin with learning outcomes. A sense of belonging cannot always be scheduled. Sometimes we need time to learn how another person thinks. Sometimes an ordinary conversation tells us something about a colleague or classmate that we would never learn in a classroom discussion. Sometimes we discover that someone who seems very different from us worries about the same things we do. And sometimes a conversation that appears to be going nowhere gives us an idea days later.

There is another side to this, however. Having time for adda is itself a privilege. Even in Bangladesh, not everyone has hours to sit and talk. Here at NDSU, many students work while studying. Some commute. Some have children or other family responsibilities. International students may carry responsibilities across two countries and two time zones. Faculty and staff have their own pressures. Telling busy people simply to “slow down” does not create more hours in their day. That is why I think the question is larger than whether individuals should talk more. Perhaps we should also ask what kinds of spaces a university creates for conversations that do not have to accomplish something immediately.

We already have some of them. A lounge can become one. So can a table at the Memorial Union, a bench outside on a warm afternoon or a few minutes after class when people decide not to leave immediately. A potluck can create one for a couple of hours. The important thing may not be the particular place. It may be our willingness to leave a little room for a conversation whose destination we do not already know. The old Coffee House song is filled with memory. It remembers people who once sat together and talked but eventually went in different directions. Perhaps that is one reason the song affected me differently this time. When I was younger and spending hours in adda, I did not think those hours were particularly valuable. They were simply part of life. Only years later, and thousands of miles away, do some of those ordinary conversations return to me. One day, the same may be true of our time at a university. We may remember the courses we took, the papers we wrote and the degrees we earned. But we may also remember an afternoon when we sat somewhere with other people and kept talking longer than we had planned. Sometimes making time to talk may not look like we are accomplishing very much. Years later, we may discover that it mattered.