Julia Baird
speaker
52 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Julia Baird’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Think of the impact of the children of the person who's doing that dropping off for the jerk. Like you'd be like, wow, why would you do that? Like that person's such a horrible person. And then if you begin to understand it, that there is a need there and that you're meeting it. And actually it also might crack the jerk open a little bit.
You never know how he might be after being treated that way or after being shown some kind of love or care. So I think that's, A different way to look at it. So your question again was... Was really, how often do you have to do this?
I think... any acts is just fine. But the example, some of the examples which I find really inspiring here, to me there is so much grace in the medical system.
and I've spent quite a bit of time, I've had serious health issues, so I've been in and out of the medical system for years and I've spent months in hospital and I've watched the doctors and the nurses care for people and they don't say to them when they're coming in, so who do you vote for? Are you nice to your neighbours? Do you keep a tidy house?
Whatever your metric is of whatever a good person is, that person will come into a hospital and will need help. and they will give it and when you see them doing that day in day out there's something actually very profoundly moving about that it's the same with paramedics and it's the same with blood donors
So blood donors who once every two weeks usually go off to a medical centre, ask a series of very invasive questions, have a needle stuck in their arm and have their actual stuff of their life drained out of them to give to someone, not because that other person's done them a favour in the past or because they're impressed with them in some way. They don't even know who it's going to be.
And, again, could be the jerk down the road, but... Again, it's a human that has a need and you're affirming your own humanity by doing that and by offering that up. And I find those quiet, often unrecognised acts really quite moving. There's a certain devotion, not just to your fellow neighbour, to like a bigger idea of who we can be in that.
Well, that study that I mentioned before, the most common way people report seeing it is in each other. And I had spent years looking at it because I'm a big ocean swimmer. I just went this morning. And... I have spent a lot of time talking to people that chase storms or run safaris in Africa or like pursue awe in different ways.
Although I'm very conscious that it's also in art and architecture and big sporting events they call collective effervescence and music. There's very many different ways to experience it. And I think it's so psychologically healthy and wonderful for us to do. Like it is the most wonderful thing. And it's also wonderful to share in other people's forms of awe.
So when I read that, actually the most common way in which people experience it is by seeing this moral beauty in each other, which I began to call grace. And I wondered why we didn't talk about that more.
That's exactly right. It's like, it's almost a holy thing, paying attention to the world and being open to it and just sitting with it. And it really will change you. Like since I decided to deliberately hunt or, cause I think that we often think, oh, we'll just, we'll be serendipitous. We'll stumble across it. Like when we go on holidays, we'll go somewhere pretty.
And I might catch a sunrise or a sunset on my way to or from work, or I've just seen a tree burst into bloom or whatever.
we can think you know that that that's the way it occurs in our lives instead of no i recognize this has got this really intrinsic value of its own and i'm going to hunt it down there was a study of all walks and they got a group of people who went on a 15-minute or walk each day for six weeks and people who went on just a normal walk the difference being the all walkers we're being told to pay attention to the world
and what really intensely and what was happening around them. They were and they were asked to take photos and write a journal. At the beginning, those who went on the oar walks, the photos of themselves was mainly their faces. Here I am, first day of my oar walk, blah, blah, blah.
By the end of it, their faces had actually shrunk in the frame as they were trying to point to something behind them. Look at this tree over here. Look at this mountain. Oh, look, you can catch a bird. They themselves become less important in the story, and it struck me as a really fantastic example
antidote to narcissism actually and to getting out of ourselves and that's what happens when we pay better attention i still want to try to understand why like why you become the person what motivates
You've either seen it or you've experienced it yourself. Or you fundamentally have a way of looking people in which you appreciate that everyone is just dealing with their own crap, that everyone, like we can have, if we sit in other people's shoes,
we're much more likely to be generous minded to those around us like okay that guy as i said like who knows what's going on in his own life like but he's someone who's sad and alone and this is something that might
might kind of crack him open this is someone who maybe hasn't been shown a lot of love by people around him i think it's i think it's that kind of thing i mean what do you think like if you've ever been motivated to do something like that and where do you think that's come from yeah it's usually i think because you've seen it somewhere else or maybe you've done it before maybe not deliberately but when you did it it felt so good you want to do it again
Yeah. Yeah, I was really interested when I spoke to a lot of super donors for my book, super blood donors, and that's people who, you know, have been doing it their whole lives, sometimes for like, you know, 50 years. Some people plan their holidays around blood donation.
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