Wednesday, February 27
Trust, essential to so many other things; with it we feel safe and when safe we feel confidant and free to move and play, create and connect with the world around us. It is as if, trust creates the space within which all good things come into existence. Like a playground with a fence around it that lets the children know they are safe to play within it with no interference from outside forces. We are after all, baby gods and the world is our playground, our place to learn and interact.
Without trust, we contract and are afraid, shrinking the space into a denser and denser concentration of energy like a neutron star that will eventually blow itself up. At the very least it will not have room for play and pleasure, creativity and open communication with the world at large.
Granted then, trust is a good thing, but if it’s so important to our well-being, why is it so rare? Why are most of us, most of the time, living without it? Part of the human experience is to continually have the rug pulled out from under us; to have our hopes disappointed, or unpleasant things happen that we’re not expecting; love lost, job lost, rejection in a myriad of forms. When this happens most people contract, as if it is a blow. And what this perceived blow hits is our trust! We then say, I can’t trust life; life is not safe; only fools trust, I’ll get hurt if I trust. Fundamentally because life is unpredictable, which it most definitely is, it is not safe to trust.
There is a certain logic to this, but it is a flawed argument for if we know that life is unpredictable, we “trust” that it is, why argue with it whenever it proves to be true? Why demand that life give us what we want when we want it in order to trust? Why not trust that life is as it is and that what comes will come and that we can trust that? So we keep our trust intact, freeing ourselves to enjoy the play. A favorite book/movie title comes to mind, “At Play in the Fields of the Lord.” This is an area where the ego is still childlike; so unsure of itself that it needs constant assurance that it’s valuable and loved, and – it’s never enough.
