The Nuances of Trust

Trusting yourself and trusting life is an absolute necessity. It is as important as walking. Movement in one’s life is 1/3rd inertia and 2/3rd trust in one’s ability to walk a certain path. 

I found myself unable to trust life because I just could not trust the future. Here is the thing; it’s hard for us to trust the future because we expect it to replicate our present or past.  Our present and past are concrete events. The future is uncertain and abstract. The law of trust is about moulding that fear of uncertainty with our positive energies in order to create for ourselves the future we want. It is an active process, not a passive assumption of life being as boorish as the past has or the present is. 

I look at trust as the ability to walk on the terrain of uncertainty. It is fundamental to movement. Our immediate futures could be good or bad, easy or simple. There is no saying whether or not it is going to be smooth sailing. But one cannot and must not lose the ability to take steps in the right direction because one cannot predict the future. We have to understand that to trust is not a want it is a necessity. It is fundamental to movement itself. 

It’s easy to trust a ball to hit the wickets if you have perfected the technique and given that the laws of physics are largely constant. The game is largely predictable based on the skill set and the laws of motion. Life, on the other hand, keeps breaking off at all that it promises. Ask you shall receive, or as you sow so you reap are phrases that have become false promises. These phrases were supposed to be laws of the world, for all of us were told these things as we grew up. We have been conditioned in that manner. We want the world to be fair. In a fair world, there is a sense of certainty in the future. But from where we stand today the world looks bleak, unfair, manipulative. We need a lot more than skills and knowledge to survive. We need courage. The courage to trust our ability to deal with whatever is coming. And reverence for the path we chose to rise to thrive and to fall on. These are essential values to proceed with. Life does not come with a rule book. It will not promise you anything. It is not a two-way relationship. Life is not personal. Hence your relationship with it is an impersonal one. As long as we look at unfortunate events of life as a result of bad fate, we will be attaching unnecessary meaning to an event that has taken place on the basis of chance. A toxic belief one can have about life is that life is unreasonably hard on just me. 

Self-esteem issues affect us as and when we grow. As children in preschool, we start getting exposed to social life, school life and we realise that we are expected to be competent at say sports, arts and crafts, studies etc. We start understanding our position in our society based on our merit and competencies as the years roll by. We feel threatened by our inabilities. It is as if we feel it will be the death of our ideal picture, of how we wanted our life to be or how we may feel worse about ourselves if we confront our inabilities head on. In my opinion, self-esteem is the most important idea that holds a person together. Working on one’s self-esteem can completely change how fast one heals from the blows of life, from a mental health issue and from criticism. It also predicts how fast one can pick up a skill or new learning. Self-esteem includes how you feel about your personality skills and aptitude and how well you think you can manage the demands of your life. It determines how confidently you can make changes in your life. 

We do not notice that there are very many factors of variables between our goals and our skills. Our skills are mere tools in a toolbox. The toolbox needs to be carried around by our ability to walk the uncertainty. One has to be road-ready. 

One of the reasons people find it difficult to trust their ability to reach their goals is because they are not road-ready. By road-ready, I mean, they don’t feel resourceful enough if the said plan goes awry. I cannot take a cross country road trip if I only know how to drive. I must know how to camp, I must know how to defend myself against danger. I must know how to arrange for food and water on the go. I must also know how to take care of my physical and mental self. After I have made sure of all these factors I can safely say I am ready for this road trip. Making sure of all the trip paraphernalia are sub-goals that serve the bigger goal. The bigger goal being the cross country road trip. Now here is the thing there will be a few sub-goals that you can achieve before you start the trip but there will be many more you have to pick up on the way. Each sub-goal will take its own time to be achieved. Learning or being familiarised with the skill is not the same as achieving it. Achievement comes with consistency and then the assimilation of that task into a routine. Sub goals will not always fall in line with goals in terms of time. For each action is an end in itself and a skill in itself. We expect to have perfect self-esteem, self-image, perfect grades, habits and fashion and we also have a professional ambition. We absolutely cannot expect to have all these goals fall in line one after the other leading up to a grand finale of the big goal. 

The way we look at time in the context of our issues is very important. We look at time lost as life lost which is why there is a sense of hurry when we want to get better. If we can’t we think there is no point putting in that kind of work for something that won’t work out. We lose patience only because we cannot tolerate the negative image of ourselves and we cannot accept that we have ruined ourselves this bad. Hence we do not break the pattern. We have to break the pattern no matter how it makes us look to ourselves. We have to trust the process. You absolutely cannot decide whether a certain process is reliable or not until you have tried it with all your heart. Any effort that’s not a 100 per cent is self-deception. You are only deceiving yourself if you aren’t honest when you assess yourself or where you really stand. You should be patient enough to watch yourself fall fail crash and burn.

Trust is always tangled in the chains of time. We lose trust because we don’t like the way things in the present turned out. What we do not realise is that everything about your tomorrow changes if you change one little thing about your day. We just lack a sense of adventure. We assume possibilities, wearing a filter of negativity.  We are scared to accept we don’t know and we don’t know what will happen a few years down the line. We do not look our own abilities as things that are subject to change we imagine catastrophes keeping our abilities at a constant. We don’t ever tell ourselves that humans have survived for aeons only because we can survive and thrive and adapt. We refuse to look at ourselves adapting to newness because we are so busy staying anxious about it. We lack imagination when we are too scared to envision greatness for ourselves. This lack of imagination demotivates us and undermines our want to be better. This track record thinking or thinking that ones future actions can only resemble the past locks us in a jail without bars. This is what makes us lose trust in ourselves. 

Time and meaning 

We want life to be accountable to us. We want to know why we were disappointed, hurt or abandoned. We want to make sense of everything before we take our next steps. The point here is growth never makes sense mid-journey. Hence one must trust the process of self-growth no matter what kind of obstacles comes in the way. 

Need for speed 

We cannot purge the panel of those people who at our age are doing a lot better than us. We want our attempts at growth to throw us right on top of the game we are pursuing. We compare ourselves to others and we want to be out there the moment we start trying. We don’t trust our inner abilities because we have “let ourselves down” again here we get stuck inside the pattern of our past actions. We need to trust a simple equation: when you change a process you change the result. Caution: you cannot half do a change and find any results. 

All in all. We need trust to live. We need trust to move, scoot and thrive. 

shreya banerjee Member since June 16, 2020

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