James Sexton: belief

Transcript context

…Do you think that’s a daily deliberate choice that a couple that makes? Because it feels like a very easy to do deliberate step, choose to see the brilliant in it, the beautiful in it, and almost immediately, everything shifts and it becomes this momentum where all you see is the beautiful and all you see is the brilliant. That is a conscious choice. I think approaching life that way is a conscious choice. Approaching any relationship that way is a conscious choice. Looking at someone who hurts you or does something hurtful to you and thinking about what’s going on in their life that they’re doing that or what’s happening with them, yeah, that’s a very conscious choice, and I think a better one, a better one than seething in animosity and letting that eat you alive. I don’t think it should be so difficult. With our children, with our pets, we don’t have this problem. You never have someone look at their dog who they’ve had for eight years and go, “Ugh, I got to get a new dog. I’ve had this one for eight years. Puppies are so cute. What am I doing with this old dog?” It’s the total opposite. They’re like, “Oh my god, this is my dog. This is my dog.” The smell of the dog is… This is my dog’s smell. The bad habits of the dog, you’re like, “It’s my stupid dog that does stupid things.” And it’s not like that has to be a conscious thing. They wake up every day and go, “I should be grateful for the dog.” It’s just visceral. It’s in them. And your children, people’s children. It’s why people are not aware of how annoying their children are because they’re not annoying to them. I get it. To you, the sound of your kids’ shrieking is like, oh my kid’s having a good time. When I hear that, I try to hear it with those ears. I’m a parent. I get it. My kids are adults now. But I get it. So when I hear a kid shrieking, I just am like, ah. To that parent, that’s the sound of that kid having a great time. And good, it’s so nice that’s in the world. So for me, it has to be conscious. For that parent, I don’t think it has to be conscious. So I think it would be great if it didn’t have to be a conscious practice, but I wonder if like anything in meditation or mindfulness, it’s a matter of exercising that way of seeing. And then once you’ve come to that- It becomes easier.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.