I am by nature an overly-reflective man. When I was barely eighteen months old, for instance, I split my eyebrow open because I was doing something I'd been told not to do; and by the time I was six years old, I had spent so much time dwelling on the incident that I had already developed a moral framework for understanding the world: When bad things happen to you, it's because you deserve it. Such can be the effect of drawing blood upon impressionable children.

In interviews, at least, Tim McGraw is having none of such over-the-shoulder second-guessing. At an L.A. press event for The Blind Side, McGraw's latest foray into screen-acting, I chatted with him for several minutes about the feel-good vibe at the center of the film's story: An African-American cast-off teen from the Memphis projects is befriended by an upper-class white family, and in the span of a mere two years is transformed into a blue-chip NCAA football recruit. This spring, Michael Oher was a first-round draft pick for the NFL's Baltimore Ravens.

This is change you can believe in, for sure—and the kind of change McGraw himself knows something about. He wasn't always a country superstar, after all. For the first several years of his life, for instance, he didn't even know who his father really was.

But when he's looking for new projects, whether they be films or new songs, McGraw says he doesn't consciously draw on his past. It's just not something he dwells on. "I tend not to think about my own" triumph over adversity, he observed. If personal connections to the material strike him at all, he says, "that sort of stuff hits me later, after I've been involved in a project." What happens for him instead is that "you're looking at it through your artist's eyes, and not through a personal perspective." What he's after is finding something that clicks, something that works artistically—not something that feels familiar.

He does see a similarity in that regard between himself and Michael Oher, whose survival instinct results in a remarkable lack of interest in living in the past—not that making major life changes is easy. McGraw notes, for instance, that leaving the projects isn't simple for anyone. "That was the life he knew, the life he was comfortable with," noted McGraw. Going to live with the upscale Tuohy family "presented a whole new set of hurdles for him. He could have said, 'It's too hard... I'd rather go back to what I know.'" But he didn't; moving forward was the priority.

McGraw also thinks the South as a whole is intent on moving forward. As the real-life Leigh Anne Tuohy noted in a separate press conference, Oher was the first black to ever enter the country club to which the Tuohy's belong. Barely five years later, though, the club hosts a variety of minorities, and not just as guests but as full members. The Blind Side documents how a particular event—such as Lawrence Taylor's career-ending sack of Joe Theismann—can be a culture-transforming fulcrum, and definitely envisions Oher's story as one of those.

Oher's story is part and parcel, McGraw says, of "the battle" which an entire generation of southerners has "fought to shed some of the ugly things" from the region's past: "a corner our generation has turned," as he put it. As The Blind Side demonstrates, of course, "red neck" behavior hasn't gone the way of the dinosaur. But McGraw is confident that, despite the fact that "it lingers," it's on the way out the door. "For the most part it's a stereotypical thing that's phasing out... Southerners are a little more worldly than we used to be."

I did learn a long time ago that bad things don't happen because you deserve them, and that you don't have to be suspicious of the good things that come your way. I doubt I'll ever find myself so positively and thoroughly engaged in the moment and moving forward as Oher and McGraw appear to be; but I have to say: such optimism is refreshing, and wildly worth celebrating.