The Table Video
How Can We Shape a More Loving Character?
Psychologist Alan Tjeltveit gives examples of mundane little actions that shape our character.
Transcript:
There’s a psychologist, Barbara Fredrickson, who works on love and she refers to micro-moments, micro-moments of positive experience. So this is to pick up on this idea that, it’s sort of in the air that we breathe, it’s in our atmosphere. Now those micro-moments can be negative or positive, but they’re so formative in these community elements just about day in, day out, every day. Those things shape us.
And I think that says a lot about who and what we are. We arrive in this world looking for love. A friend of mine, psychologist Todd Hall, says “We’re loved into loving”. We need experiences of being loved in order to shape a kind of loving character. But that’s what I want to ask each of you about. What practices, whether these are the practices of parents towards children, the practices of neighbors towards neighbors, the practices of, your own practices towards one’s enemies. How do we think about these micro-moments or these habits or practices forming a more loving character in us? Thinking about what we do from moment to moment? How can we shape a more loving character?
Well Aristotle of course, talked about developing habits and the right kind of habits which would help one move towards character. I think, I’m in a funny position, I’m very rational. Part of love is emotional. My mother was better at loving than I am. My father was, my wife is. And one of the things my wife stresses, or she likes putting money in the plate. She likes going to the soup kitchen and actually giving people food. These practical hands-on things.
At one point I wanted to be an engineer, so with regard to my tithe I said “Why don’t we just have an auto-deduct from the bank? It’d be so much simpler.” [laughter] But I think there’s merit in the hands-on regular doing because it does shape one’s character. The author, Jonathan Haidt, tells a story about, it’s fictitious, but imagine that your son’s going in for surgery and there are two nurses taking care of him. Both are technically competent and suppose also, we know that our son doesn’t actually feel any thing.
But one nurse, kind of reflexively, as the procedure’s being done, strokes his head. Which nurse do we admire more? It’s the one who kind of an ongoing basis, it’s her character, it’s who she is that leads her to do that. And I’m sure that that is the result of years and years of being acutely attuned to the needs of the people in front of them.
What do you think, in the case for the nurse, to kind of make this story more robust, what kinds of life experience makes her the kind of person that is gentle and caring and loving toward the person who might not even receive it?
Well, there are a couple of possibilities, because people get to the same place in different ways. The most obvious possibility is she herself was deeply loved. But then there are some people who come from really horrible backgrounds, and they say “This was a terrible way to be raised. I am determined to be something other than that.” So some very loving people come from non-loving homes. So it can work either way.
