“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them” – Ernest Hemingway

Trust is a dwindling virtue these days, do you say my friends?

At a time where competition and greed run rampant we do each live like tiny islands isolated, carrying the burdensome baggage of loneliness, feeling we have to do what we need to on our own. A boss is overwhelmed because the duties he delegates do not bring in results fast enough, a mother is overwhelmed with the task of constantly monitoring her boys’ internet surfing, a young wife is overwhelmed with the idea of living up to the expectations of the people around her, a senior wonders if he will wither away alone, a teenage child would rather get advice from unreliable sources online than trust his parents or peers about his heartfelt turmoil, a husband would rather turn to alcohol than confide in his companion about his insecurities.

So lost, so alone and so misunderstood we trust nobody, often not even ourselves.  It is an over populous world. Should not just our whispers be enough to cause a ripple effect and reach our voices to the other end? Yet we plague ourselves with the incessant need to stand on rooftops and scream out our worth and sadly find nobody listens, nobody understands us.

Maybe my friends, it’s because we are looking at the virtue of trust all wrong. What do we mean by saying we trust somebody?

When a wife tells her husband she trusts him or a mother tells her son she trusts him she usually means that she knows what they do with their time when she is not around. When a boss tells his subordinates he trusts them he means they will deliver exactly what he expects of them. When a friend tells another she trusts her what she means is the matters they have discussed will not be a topic of conversation elsewhere.

So you see in almost every scenario the trust we place in people is linked to our expectations of them. We conjure up images in our minds of what we think all the people in our lives should be like and if by chance they warp the picture we’ve created, well…then they have broken our trust and there is hurt and blame. Trust, as we see it, loosely translates to unmet expectations.

Then my friends, it will dawn on us that trust is a knowing that in the grandiose scheme of life, all is well, always. It is a knowing that there is never a perfect time, perfect place or perfect person. Everything is perfect as is.

And the next time we tell somebody we trust them let us empower them with our love and faith in their ability to tune in to their own intuitive FMs and do what is right. Let us truly respect them by supporting their decisions even if it is not what we think it should be. Let us be little linked islands of hope, not tiny isolated islands of despair.

Author’s Note: Inspired by a beautiful series of videos on relationships by BK Shivani. Truly eye opening.
This post was also published as Learning to Trust in LifePositive magazine in June 2017. To see more of my publications, click here.

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