love and trust are built up out of tiny moments
Transcript of this video:
I remember many years ago going to visit my sister and we were standing in the kitchen watching her son, my nephew Patrick, who must have been I guess eight or nine years old at the time.
And he was playing in the garden with one of his mates, and they were doing that thing where – you must have done this as a child -you discovered that if you focus the light of the sun through a magnifying glass, you can actually start a fire.
And they were doing that in the garden and they were very satisfied the result, they got a little fire going, and then clearly,from a distance we could see, they then decided that the brilliant way to put this fire out would be to pee on it, which they did very gleefully.
And I don’t think my sister and I said anything. We just looked at each other and laughed.
I think of this incident years later as a really good example of a series of what the psychologist Barbara Frederickson calls a series of “micromoments of positivity resonance”, which is one of those pieces of jargon,which though it’s superficially rather ugly, kind of tickles my fancy.And I really
like it and I mention it in the chapter on my new book, Unhurried, the chapter called Small Magic. cos it touches on something that I think is quite important.
She suggests that it’s quite hard scientifically to identify what love is, but it seems to be made up of a series of these micro moments of positivity, resonance.
And one of the themes of my work is to be on the lookout for those in our meetings. Instead of getting obsessed with grand narratives, look for the micromoments.
Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash
