Ice + Breakers

Once in a bar after a team dinner, there were maybe twenty five of us grouped up and gathered. Our sheer numbers muscled out the few regulars who were trying to drown on a Thursday night. Drinks were passed from the bartender to whomever and through our crowd to the empty hand waving that they needed another one. In the slosh of work conversation a coworker appeared over another’s shoulder and asked “all the money in the world, you can’t give it to charity, what are you doing?” My eye may have twitched when I heard the question that I consider pretty surface level uninteresting but a classic ice breaker none the less.

The issue with ice breakers is they don’t actually raise the stakes of the relationship of the person you’re meeting. I don’t care that Karen’s favorite type of food is Ethiopian or that Charles owns a golden doodle. Close your eyes and put yourself in a snowfall. Standing in the soft rolling white, big fluffy flakes waltzing their way down from the sky, then you hear the sound of ice cracking. You feel it in your calves, suddenly tight and wound and ready to spring but to where. Ice breaking is the sound of teeth popping into pieces under the pressure of a jaw clenched against the force of fate’s unending shove. That is the kind of stakes I want to bring if someone is asking me a question to get to know me.

The question my coworker asks doesn’t touch on the core of anything about my person. With nothing to lose, what would you do is straight up boring. “What would you sacrifice in order to do what you want to do” is a much better, much more heartfelt way to phrase that question. Perhaps we know the fragility to facing our own braveness, that vulnerability isn’t easy for everyone. For me the unease is in having to hear how another person likes Mexican food or traveling or worse that they went to school for a degree in a subject totally unrelated but ended up here. The unease is in not knowing what another person has sacrificed, in not seeing them for their bravery,