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May 4th On trust

 This blog is not about fishing but on something else which is important to me personally.

I just wanted to share it as a gesture of friendship not anything else.

It is not an argument I wish to defend.

 

 

 

On trust

This past winter I have been doing a lot of deep reflection and soul searching..

I have confronted many of the ideas that have shaped and formed my life and found then lacking substance and that they are stale. Old ideas good for the time they were formed in but no longer vibrant and relevant. Times change and so does the world we live in.

I grew up in the forties and fifties and learned the values of those times based on the way the world was then.

My family was my whole world my dad and mom my relatives their hopes and dreams and those of all the people I knew then affected me and told me what life was and what to expect.

 

It played out exactly as I was told.

I never questioned those values at some deep level but this past winter changed all that.

I found I did not want the rest of my life to play out as expected.  I did not like what my life like was all that much.

I wanted more a lot more.

So I decided that the only way I could have more in my life was to question every value I had been given to live by and tear them apart and see clearly what was real and valuable and what was mindless belief not based on what is real and lasting.

 

My beliefs I found had isolated me from truly knowing people around me.

Not that people were hard to know but that caution and a fundamental mistrust of people had been inherited from my family of origin.

Wise in its own way but incredibly limiting by default.

Everyone had to prove themselves as trustworthy to be trusted and why?

Fear.

 

A cultural fear of unknown dangers passed down in body language and in the doings of daily life from parents to children to school to work and proven to be true because of a isolating viewpoint in programming. 

A soft mistrust of anyone and everyone unknown.

A soft mistrust, soft like quicksand.

A deadly mistrust that permeated all relationships unless they were proven to be trustworthy.

Vigilance, red flags a slip of the tongue and a perceived hesitation.

Evidence of…

 

The root of all this cautionary insight was a soft mistrust.

Safety first was the only way.

As I looked at this I came to see something fundamental.

If all relationships are based on a soft mistrust then all relationships have to fail because mistrust is at their root.

Who is trustworthy?

Mistrust asks that question.

 

This past winter I asked another question to my self and it was this.

What is the point of trust.

Then I said, “What would my life be like if I based it on trust instead of finding trustworthy people to trust.”

 

I decided that I would find out by changing my belief system from that of soft mistrust to trust alone with no expectations of result.

I am just going to live with a trust that others are the same as me and that they are free to be as they are regardless of my expectations of them just like I free to be me as I am with them.

No proof of trustworthiness needed.

A choice that can be made.

 

I mean no one harm.

No one means me harm.

Allow people to be free to be themselves in my life from now on.

It is a much lighter way then being so intense and vigilant.

 

Is it dangerous?

 

I expect so but I prefer the wonder of trust to the ponderousness of mistrust and the heaviness that it brings to living with our brothers and sisters and our loved ones.

Mistrust destroys what is good it does not protect what is good.

 

I  want everyone in my life to be free of mistrust and I want to be free of all mistrust for the rest of my life.

I am not looking for trustworthy people any more to trust.

 

I never really knew how to mistrust correctly anyway.

It just wreaked havoc with me.

The hell with it.

 

I do not trust mistrust to protect my life any more,

I prefer to take my chances with trust guiding my heart from now on.

 

I want to see what life brings you when you live by trust.

 

Amen.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 5:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “May 4th On trust”

  1. Rick Says:
    May 7th, 2009 at 4:17 pm

    Thank you for sharing this. The past few years has brought many challenges to my hopes and aspirations and has shaken my foundation. I haven’t made the steps you have taken this past winter, but I appreciate what you wrote.

    Like you, much of what I “know” and “believe” came from my parents, grandparents, and other relatives. There was something special about the close-knit family relationships of years ago. My father taught me that we don’t have “problems”, we have “challenges”. I think there is much positive in that approach, but, as I have struggled over the past months, they sure as heck look like problems to me.

    Thanks Ken.

    Rick

  2. Edward Says:
    June 26th, 2009 at 7:47 pm

    “…managing mistrust…”
    “…mistrust ultimately destroys…”

    This quandary intrigues me. I am a devout fisherman and prefer the solitude of hunting the fish and I also am forced to (as I thought I was) into the solitude of reflection. I have heard this concept by many names and it seems to have taken a life of its own. Some people say trust, others say faith, agreements, assumptions, contracts…etc.

    I see this concept of trust as a quality of our interations with everything around us. The water and even the fish are relatively absolved from breaking my trust/faith. The sea is a wicked mistress…but if she turns on me…I won’t be surprised. If the fish won’t cooperate…I’ll be upset but these entities are not people. Anthropomorphizing them is just that: ascribing human features onto them.

    Now take the interactions we have with other people. The trust that we have with our fellow human beings has so much more value. Why? Because they have the capacity to understand how their action/inaction affects other people. Nature doesn’t have the capacity to understand our plight. When we get burned…someone knows what happened. Wrap you mind around that. It hurts…whereas if I get washed into a rip by a rouge wave…I can accept it.

    With all the permutations of different outcomes, there is nothing that is guaranteed to come out perfect for me. So…someone is bound to let me down. It is going to hurt. Keeping others at a distance (mistrusting them) protects from the hurt. It is that simple.

    Prior to trusting (and therefore excluding all mistrust) maybe you should ask the question: am I prepared to loose …everything? If there is zero intrinsic value to what is in your life…you will be OK. If not you will eventually come back to some soft line of mistrust. I am not saying ascribing zero intrinsic value to things in this world is bad…they say there was a commercial fisherman in Galilee who did it before…unfortunately he died.

    In the end, I haven’t come to the point where I can do that…for now…mistrust…misanthropy…solitary fishing is there. I will still try.

  3. Steve Says:
    July 25th, 2009 at 1:04 pm

    I enjoyed the openness of the story you wrote on trust. I recently started reading a couple of books I read 25yrs ago. They came to me…..by chance? circumstance? Ill try to make this short. But that may be hard. I was going to school and living in NYC attending Parsons School of Design. I was in the Environmental design program their. Before NY and graduating from HS “77 I studied Fine Art. Always struggling with the different mediums,disciplines,techniques. Struggling not with mastering how to use them. But struggling with the thought of ? Did they convey what I was trying to say. I mentioned in a post on the boards a few years back about a Quantum Phycisist David Bohme. For some reason he clicked with me. Though I am awful with math and just cant wrap my head around mathematical equations. The article, was an interview with Bohme (Omni Magazine). As he discussed questions by the interviewer I understood and grasped what he was saying. I thought to myself here is someone who thinks about ideas that I think about everyday. Im not crazy and my thoughts are relevant, to my existence and path in life. After painting,drawing,sculpting,building models,photographing and tearing them up breaking them or burning them because I felt that they did not measure up to what I was trying to say. So I began accepting them for what, where, and why they were. They were because of me. Acceptance of what is. People, society,nature,life. My point about Bohme and his effect on me was, in reflection. If he were to explain what he was trying to say through a series of Equations I would not have been able to begin to grasp it. I dont think that way. But! here was someone who would put together extremely complex theories and equations to answer or explain to himself and other theorists very complex ideas. But he was also able to explain them with his writings and through his discussions in a simple way that made sense to me. Two books Ive started reading last month that I think are really insightful. “The Limits of Thought” “The End of Time”discussions between D. Bohme and Krishnamurti. Very good books. Your story about truth made me think about this .So I thought I would share it. Thanks Steve

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