The Feeling of Trust
When we take a seat, there’s a moment where we stop supporting our weight and we allow ourselves to free fall into the chair. At that moment we are in absolute trust that the chair will catch and hold us. And what we’re feeling is peace.
Imagine if we were going to sit on a chair that we mistrust. We’d probably hold onto the arms of the chair and slowly sit down on it. And after sitting down, we’d stay ready to support our weight just in case it collapsed. It would probably take us some time to finally trust the chair. But once we did, we’d stop worrying about it. We’d be at peace with it.
Trust is the feeling of peace. And it’s so subtle and prevalent in our lives that most of us have convinced ourselves that it’s hard for us to trust when in reality we trust all the time. We trust that the phone that we’re carrying isn’t going to catch on fire or the buildings we enter aren’t going to collapse. If we’re lucky enough to live in a modern city, we trust that when we turn on the lights they’ll turn on or that we’ll have running hot and cold water in our homes.
When we go for a drive, we trust the car we’re driving, all the other cars and drivers we’re driving with, and the roads we’re driving on. But if we see a car behaving strangely, we pay attention to that car because we mistrust it. And that feeling of mistrust will be so strong and foreign, that we’ll remember the one car we mistrusted and forget about all of the other thousands of cars that we did trust.
It’s so common and normal for us to trust that when something causes us to mistrust, it is traumatizing. Like a single black dot on an all-white background, the contrast is so great that the dot is all we see. And it’s this contrast that makes us believe our feelings of mistrust are so strong, even if it might only be equivalent to a small black dot.
This contrast can mislead us into believing that the feelings of trust must be equally as powerful as the feelings of mistrust. And, since we can’t feel the power of trust, we conclude that it’s because we can’t trust or find it difficult to trust.
But this isn’t to discount our feelings of mistrust, we might have very strong and valid reasons why we do. But to believe we can’t trust or find it difficult to trust isn’t true. And, more importantly, the only way to resolve our feelings of mistrust is through trust because without it we’ll never feel at peace.
Trust is an all-powerful constant in our lives and we shouldn’t artificially disconnect from it. It allows us to admire the sunset, trusting that another day will come and sleep at night, trusting that we’ll wake up the next day. Trust is the feeling of peace and by acknowledging it and allowing ourselves to feel it, we can learn to cultivate and expand it.
