The conversations you never anticipated can be some of the most challenging. They also, I learned the other day, can be the most rewarding. This particular dialogue didn’t begin with much promise. It only happened because no one came to a community event where I was scheduled to speak. I don’t mean “not many” came, or “fewer than we expected.” I mean not one single person showed up who wasn’t part of the program. That left a half-dozen of us, the would-be speakers, to sit around uncomfortably until it felt like we’d waited long enough to abandon the (ahem) gathering. Instead, one of the six asked the rest of us a question. And we discussed it far longer than the event would have lasted.