Trust

This is a long overdue post that began in the events of this Monday. . .
I went up to Salt Lake City, trying to make a little more money. I always think about the principle of trust when I am on the train. You can see the level of it that people have for strangers from the moment you make eye contact. Where the quick look-away diverts your attention to the next set of eyes, the longer (though still brief) look of relaxed trust draws you near and even is indicative of romance if the gaze is sent by way of the opposite gender. Our ability to trust is often influenced (though not defined) by how trustworthy those of our first social experiences have been. I personally have had wonderful parents who were always reliable, and I love people, so trust comes easy for me. I came to the conclusion in my high-school years that trusting others is its own reward. I came up with this moniker as part of my foundation of life-philosophy in response to the relentless onslaught of those around me criticizing me for being "gullable," "easily-fooled," and "naive." The words of Mother Theresa come to mind

People are often unreasonable, illogical and self centered / Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives / Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies /Succeed anyway / If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you / Be honest and frank anyway / What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway / If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous / Be happy anyway / The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow / Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough / Give the world the best you've got anyway / You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and your God / It was never between you and them anyway.

 It isn't about whether or not people take advantage of my trust (though in things I can't get back, such as possessions, money, and data, I am trusting but balance it with a bit of wisdom, in that I don't open opportunities for the weaknesses of others to be exposed). The amount of stress -- not to mention the relationships, life-lessons, and opportunities lost -- caused by fearing others, in my mind, is not a healthy exchange for the occasional hurt/loss of emotions and materials. That leads me to an extrapolation of first-underlined statement. I was speaking with a friend (who is kind to me in my writing) about some time she spent in Japan. She told me of how much openness and kindness the people there possess. In other words, she sensed that trust came easier for them. I told her, "If trusting people is its own reward, then isn't distrusting people its own punishment." I bask in what another friend, in his 60s and in the pinnacle of health, mentioned over the phone in the midst of my adventures in the Appalachian autumn :

I traveled 11,000 miles across America when I was a young adult, and I met this man who had been to all 210-odd sovereign nations, and he reported what I had believed all along. . . That people are good, want to help, are just wonderful. If only we would stop watching the news we might see it.

Beautiful! I just laughed and laughed in delight at that. What gets in the way of the human relationship? Fear. Distrust, a product of fear. And call me strident, but isn't that the only principle the news media presents? To quote Charles, "That's all they teach you. Be afraid. Be afraid. Nope, no, be afraid." I don't engage in it because it teaches the antithesis of this post's title. Another word for trust is faith. We can have faith in Deity. We can also, and must also for the flowering of any joyful human interaction, have faith in one another. Faith and fear cannot coexist in the same emotional space. One must vacate the other, or be overtaken by the other, by its converse. And what's worse, when we cease to trust, we cease to grow. Distrust indeed is its own dereliction.