graceful realism and scanning for the positive

"Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes."

Friedrich Nietzsche

"Having eyes, do you not see?"

Jesus

I keep thinking about a conversation I had with a marriage counselor in a diner in Hells Kitchen. 

"You know what's strange?" he said, leaning forward in his booth. "Most couples come to me thinking they need help solving their problems. What they really need is help seeing each other again."

So many of us have lost the ability to really see. Our culture has trained us to view the world and each other through increasingly critical eyes. 

Here in New York, where everything is rated and reviewed—from the morning flat white to the evening Uber—we've become a society of critics. The same fingers that scroll through social media, dispensing likes and dislikes, have started turning our frustrations toward home, finding flaws in the very people we once prayed God would give us and that we are called to love.
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I don’t want to be a critical man, but it’s hard. It’s like our entire society has learned to reduce people down to their mistakes, idiosyncrasies, and failures. 

Our brains seem to have been rewired to scan for the negative.

The science behind this tendency is fascinating. Dr. Rick Hanson, a psychologist and Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, highlights a profound reality about our brains: negative experiences cling to us like Velcro, while positive ones tend to slip away like Teflon. Without intentional effort to focus on and savor what's good, our neural pathways default to a constant scan for flaws, creating grooves of criticism that deepen with time. This "negativity bias" may have been helpful in other times of history, but it sabotages our relationships today.

I don’t want to scan for the negative.

Jesus never did.

He consistently saw people in ways that confounded those around Him. I'm struck by how often the Gospels mention Jesus "seeing" people—really seeing them. When others saw a corrupt tax collector, Jesus saw Zacchaeus' hunger for connection. When religious leaders saw an adulteress worthy of death, Jesus saw someone worthy of redemption. When convention said to avoid the Samaritan woman, Jesus saw an opportunity for transformation.

His way of seeing changed people. 

Dr. John Gottman discovered this in his research on lasting relationships. After studying thousands of couples, he found that the successful ones maintained a ratio of five positive interactions for every negative one. They learned to scan for the positive. But here's what fascinates me: These couples weren't ignoring problems. They had simply learned to notice and name the good they saw in each other.

Think about your core relationships. What are you scanning for in those you love? 
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I witnessed this kind of vision years ago, watching my father care for my grandfather during his elderly years. My grandfather had been a missionary in India and a pretty absent father. He was from the old school, the generation that sent kids to boarding school and only saw them a couple weeks a year. My grandfather could be intense. He had strong opinions, a loud voice, and was his own man. He could be unpredictable in meetings and dominate conversations.

Yet, I never heard my Dad complain about this. Instead, he had a different filter in those years. He scanned his life for the positive. It wasn’t dramatic, huge pronouncements or declarations, but daily patience and sacrificial love. It was the ratio of empathy to annoyance that stood out. He didn’t go back over his childhood with bitterness and judgment. He scanned for the positive, focusing on the legacy of having a Dad who loved God and laid a foundation of faith.

This isn't toxic positivity or emotional repression that pretends everything is fine. Rather, it's what I'm learning to call "graceful realism." A way of seeing that has the courage to acknowledge both beauty and brokenness, light and shadow, potential and pain. It's the kind of vision that can hold the tension between what is and what could be, between the reality of our struggles and the possibility of transformation.

When I find myself slipping into criticism (a daily war), I try to remember what a friend in recovery once told me. "The problem isn't just what we're looking at," he said. "It's how we've trained ourselves to look." He went on to describe how his AA community practices gratitude, not as a feeling to conjure up but as a way of seeing to be cultivated.

Recent studies in neuroplasticity offer us cynics some hope. Dr. Barbara Fredrickson's research shows that intentionally focusing on positive emotions for just fifteen seconds can begin rewiring our neural pathways. The "broaden-and-build" theory suggests that positive emotions don't just make us feel good; they expand our awareness and build psychological resources for the way we see the future.

I've started to note specific graces I see in the people closest to me: a staff member's integrity in a difficult decision, a congregant's kindness to an unhoused person in our prayer room, my wife's patience with writing these emails late on a Wednesday night :). It's changing how I see, slowly, imperfectly, but surely. 

Graceful realism is becoming the filter of my life. 
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What happens when we train ourselves to scan for the positive? I've observed several shifts: 

Cynicism begins to soften into compassion. 
Irritation makes space for understanding. 
Complaints give way to curiosity.

Graceful realism doesn't dismiss problems or minimize pain. Instead, it provides a broader, deeper context for understanding them. 

I once took a class on capturing portraits in street photography. The key was to "Look for the light in people's eyes." Everyone has it. Sometimes, you have to wait for it, and sometimes, you have to help create it. But it's always there, even in this city where people can seem to be a blur.

Perhaps that's our calling, too. Scan for light, become collectors of grace, and witnesses to the persistent presence of good in each other. The ones who irritate might become the ones we celebrate, not because they've changed, but because you've learned to see them through the eyes of grace.

This week, try keeping your own record of grace. 

Scan for the positive. 
Become a curator of goodness in your relationships. 

Write down five specific things you value about each person close to you. Share what you see. Watch how it changes not just them but you as well. 

After all, isn't that how transformation often works? Not through dramatic revelation but through small shifts in vision that gradually reveal what was there all along: the image of God, waiting to be seen.

Here's to making graceful realism the filter of our lives.

Cheers.

Jon.