I think trust is the most feared word in the English language. Remember the childhood game of falling backward and trusting someone to catch you? Who would you have trusted to do that? Your best friend or the school bully? Of course you’d trust your best friend. You knew your best friend by history and background. You knew your friend was a good person and could never have just stood there while you fell and watched you get hurt. You and this friend have had fights and disagreements, your friend did crazy things sometimes, but you knew through and through, without a doubt, that friend would never hurt you. The bully, on the other hand, stole your stuff, tripped you when you walked by, and belittled you in front of others. There’s no doubt in your mind you would never have trusted the bully to catch you.
As adults we find it harder to discern the “best friends” from the “bullies”, but the process is essentially the same. When someone close to us hurts us, it’s necessary to look at intention and past history before throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. First consider, would that friend ever hurt us intentionally, like the bully? Would they let us fall to ground?
Next consider, is that friend able to maintain long term, healthy relationships in their own life? This is important if you are trying to decide if someone is inherently a good person. (I’m not insinuating that just because some people can’t have long term relationships, they can’t be basically good people – I would never make that judgment.) I am saying that if a person can manage to maintain healthy long term relationships both in their home and workplace, it is a good indicator that they are inherently a good person, one that can be leaned on, one that can be trusted, one that has a strong faith and their relationships are a testament to their trustworthiness and are a good bet they’d always catch you when you fall.
Sometimes that gap between risk and trust is deep, wide, and frightening. Remember Indiana Jones? When he stepped into that chasm, a bridge he never knew was there appeared below his feet. Consider this, from my morning meditation:
“Center yourself and meditate on a chasm of your own making. It might be a trench of stubbornness or pride that no one can cross, or the echo of your own pain that isolates you, or the vastness that builds when you are afraid to tell someone the truth of your heart, or the absence of faith that what you deserve waits on the other side. Lean into your chasm until the fear subsides. Offer, through your breath, a wordless compassion for yourself and all others in our very human struggle to step with risk, and land with trust.”
I can’t help but feel that everytime we “step with risk and land with trust” it helps solidify our own person and make the next chasm we will inevitably face just little less scary.
And so, as another day goes by, I’m counting on bridges to appear, and ..I have written.
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