We Don’t Talk About the Weather

Chad and I had an unspoken rule.

We didn’t talk about the weather.

Not because we were above small talk in some pretentious way. Not because we had some formal agreement or made a conscious decision about it. It just never came up. And when I think about why, the answer says more about what a real friendship looks like than anything I could deliberately set out to write.

When you find someone who matches you at the level that actually matters, the trivial stuff falls away on its own. You do not sit down with that person and discuss what is happening outside. You pick up wherever you left off, which is always somewhere interesting, because interesting is the only place the two of you ever were.

What We Talked About Instead

We talked about ideas. About music. About golf swings and poker hands and what we were reading and what we were building and what we thought about the world and whether we were living the way we wanted to be living.

We argued. We pushed back on each other. We told each other things that were uncomfortable to say because we trusted that the other person could handle it and deserved to hear it. That kind of honesty is rare. It is, I would argue, the entire point of having someone in your life at that level.

The Chad Balance was an essay I wrote about knowing when to speak and when to stay quiet. Chad embodied that principle naturally, knowing when the moment called for bluntness and when it called for silence. He never wasted words. Which meant the words he chose actually mattered.

You cannot fake that. You either have it with someone or you do not.

The Stoic Undercurrent

There is a reason the weather never made it into our conversations, and it is not just that we had better things to discuss.

The weather is something you cannot control. It is happening whether you pay attention to it or not. Discussing it at length is, in the most literal sense, a waste of the time you have been given.

The Stoics understood this as well as anyone. The discipline of distinguishing what is within our power from what is not, and directing our energy exclusively toward the former, is as practical a philosophy as has ever existed. Marcus Aurelius did not spend his time worrying about the rain. Neither did Chad.

I have been drawn to Stoicism for a long time, and I think part of the reason is that it provides the philosophical framework for something Chad practiced intuitively. Do not waste energy on what you cannot change. Invest it entirely in what you can.

What It Means to Lose That

When I wrote about losing Chad, I tried to describe what he meant as a human being, as a friend, as a presence in a room. I am not sure I got it fully right. I am not sure it is possible to get it fully right.

What I know is that there are people in your life who make you better simply by being in it. Not because they flatter you or because they are easy to be around, but because they are genuine. Because they treat your time together like it matters. Because they will never, under any circumstances, ask you what you think about the forecast.

Recently, I had the privilege of spending time with his mother, a woman of extraordinary grace and warmth, and something she said made me think about this exact quality. She talked about the difference between conversations that fill time and conversations that fill people. Chad came from a home that understood that difference. It showed.

The Practical Truth

Here is what I want you to take from this, because there is something practical buried in what might otherwise read as nostalgia.

Look at your conversations. Not your texts, not your social media, not your small talk at the grocery store. Your real conversations. The ones that happen when you sit down with someone you genuinely care about. What are you talking about?

If the answer is mostly weather and traffic and whatever happened in the news this week, that is worth noticing. Not because those things have no place, but because they have a way of crowding out the things that do.

If not now, when? That phrase was inspired by Chad. It applies here too. The people in your life who are worth talking to are not going to be there forever. The conversations that actually mean something do not happen by accident. You have to show up for them.

Put down the small talk. Ask the real question. Find out what the person across from you is actually thinking about.

The weather will take care of itself.