How real are you in conversation?

The thing is, once you’ve felt cashmere, there’s no going back to acrylic.

It’s true for sweaters and scarves. I am finding that it’s equally true for the quality of the conversations and connections between people.

That thought came to me today as I strolled down Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris. As my feet wandered, my mind did too.

Avenue Victor Hugo is an elegant thoroughfare in a lush neighbourhood in the 16th arrondissement of the city, not too far from the Champs Elysées and close to the Eiffel Tower.

It’s the kind of street where there are entire shops dedicated to caviar and where, in this autumn season, all the clothes boutiques seem to have luxury cashmere apparel on display in their windows.

While the merchandise varies from one retailer to another, what they have in common is that they all diffuse a distinctively warm waft of superiority that comes from the sincerity of craftsmanship rather than the superficiality of snobbery.

I first wore cashmere in 2018 when I treated myself to an oversize cardigan and a pair of lounge pants found in a St Germain outlet store. It was an unreasonable purchase at the time given I had recently been laid off from my job. But it felt necessary. I literally and figuratively needed a spell of being wrapped up in wool before I could feel ready to take on the world again.

The thing about cashmere is that once you’ve felt the incomparable soft luxury against your skin, it ruins you. There’s no going back to anything less.

Six years on, my oversize cardigan is stained and a little holey as are my lounge pants. But I love them. And they love me. We’ve been through a lot together. Until they actually fall apart, I will keep wearing them, like a sort of contrarian armour that keeps me soft and warm in a world that would love to make me hard and cold.

Cashmere falls into the category of what the French call “les matières nobles” which translates mechanically to “noble materials” but I find the translation clunky and unsatisfactory because it’s not something that rolls easily off the tongue for us native English speakers.

What does come easily is my strong affinity for les matières nobles – things like wood, marble, granite, precious metals, silk… and fine Mongolian cashmere.

“Noble materials" are unarguably solid and natural. They feel wholesome. They carry within them history and that brings an innate honesty, a raw authenticity that can’t be faked.

Objects fashioned from une matière noble feel different to me. I realise it’s a contradiction in terms to speak of feeling in relation to something inanimate and yet, it’s true: there is an entirely different energy in something made of purely natural materials, crafted by hand, compared to something mass-produced of synthetic origin.

Perhaps it’s in my head, this vibrational frequency. But it feels real to me.

And because I feel the presence and the energy of true substance, I also feel its absence.

Lately, I have been feeling its absence most acutely in conversations where the tenor of the discourse is devoid of anything close to resembling a noble material. The conversational frequency leaves me depleted and flat, emptier than before the words we exchanged were spoken.

I call these “acrylic conversations”: it might look nice on the surface but try it on for size, wear it for a while, and quite rapidly it’s clear there’s no real resonance, not a shred of matière noble to warm the soul or nourish the part of my being that desperately craves connection.

I prefer to avoid these conversations when I can, finding more solace in solitude than in the emptiness of words that resolutely fail to hit any target of togetherness that I might have hoped for.

My dearest conversations, the ones that have forged my closest friendships and that allow me and my fellow human to feel truly seen and heard are the ones where we both don the crumpled cashmere of our deepest, most vulnerable selves.

The best conversations - the ones that bring us closer to the truth of each other - are the ones where we lay bare the many stains and the frayed edges that are testimony to the different chapters of messy lives lived, to loves lost, to challenges faced, and to pain endured.

Real conversations are where we show each other our ragged sleeves and necklines, sometimes gingerly at first but then with more courage and a growing openness as we realise there is no reason for shame, no risk of reprisal, or any jeopardy of judgment.

There is a unique and precious fabric to a conversation that connects. It is perhaps the most noble material of all. A tissue of feeling, of empathy, of compassion, complicity and understanding.

It is in revealing our knots and warps, the places where our souls are ripped and scarred that we truly find each other in sharing our experience of existence. The joy of love and laughter. The thrill of discovery. The abject despair of loss.

So much of what we see and hear around us in the world today tells us to filter out everything less than perfect, to the point of rejecting the natural, evolved state of anything, especially ourselves.

But to this, I say no. I say no defiantly and with conviction.

It’s time to buck that trend. We deserve better and owe each other more than airbrushed acrylic platitudes.

We are human, imperfect and noble beings. Frayed and flawed and magnificent.

We are made for connection. The cashmere of our souls is what keeps us warm and warms the world around us.

It might be ragged, a little grubby, worn, and misshapen.

We might be ragged, a little grubby, worn, and misshapen.

But no matter!

My friend, I dare you to dare to reveal.

Show me the cracks that hurt you and I will show you mine. We can revel in our imperfections together.

Tell me the story of how your scars healed and why those other wounds keep weeping, and I will tell you all about my own.

Hold space for me and I will hold space for you.

When you shiver, I will wrap you in the cashmere that keeps my heart warm and soft.

And sometimes I might ask you to lend me your sweater.

In our togetherness, my friend, the world won't feel so cold.

?AJ