Trust

In the earliest days of MakeLifeClick, we spent time exploring the 7 values that underpin the community. These are:

1. Trust
2. Humility
3. Honesty
4. Kindness
5. Appreciation
6. Courage
7. Curiosity

We explored each of these in season 1 of the podcast – you can listen to the final wrap-up episode here.

Alongside the podcast, members of the community wrote some heartfelt posts, expressing what these words/values mean to them.

Over the next while, we’ll be sharing some of these. Here’s a piece by Emily, exploring Trust…

Trust

Trust is a word we all have a different relationship with. To trust is to have a positive expectation of, a confidence in something or someone.

I went down to the sea the other day. Walking my dog, Polly, is something I love to do. Stopping for a while just to breathe. As I walk I’m captivated by the turbulence of the sea. The air is freezing – the kind of weather that brings every sense to life. That frizzes your hair and makes you wish you had a tissue. That numbs your cheeks and fingers. That makes you not want to go home because you feel so alive. As I watch and I walk I begin to think about my relationship with the word trust. And the feelings that arise begin to mirror the fierceness of the waves. I see in my minds eye the word ‘TRUST’, besieged by distorted borders and foggy lines. And I think – if my life were scribbled out in a book, each sentence torn out, folded up, jumbled up, thrown into the ether… where would they land?

Because I’m a visual processor… busy trying to process these three questions:

1. Why do I struggle so much to trust?
2. In who and where have I wrongly put my trust?
3. In who and where do I choose to put my trust?

Others? Stuff? A higher being? The truth?

Myself?

All of the above?

Trust is a word that carries much weight. A shroud to words like assurance, dependence, reliance, conviction, hope, faith, confidence. And for me, as someone who grapples daily with a need for certainty, to trust is to risk; an act which requires both emotion and logic, which lies in a culmination of past experience. To trust is to give space for the arousel of some parts of our psyche that perhaps at times lie dormant; a process that can stimulate pain, anxiety, fear of disappointment, fear of being let down, fear of getting it wrong…

A process that can also lead to life, freedom, meaningful relationship in all its fullness.

And this is what I want to focus on. Because this is where I am at right now. I wouldn’t say I’m very far into the journey, but it’s a journey that has begun, and I’m determined to stay in my lane!

The exploration of truth

We read the media, watch documentaries, read articles by professionals all claiming that they know, speak and write the latest ‘truth’. Latest stats, research, findings. Not opinions… but truth. The word ‘apparently’ is exhausted daily in the playground by parents desperately seeking guidance through the monotony that is COVID-19. We go home feeling a little encouraged by what we have heard only to read that the opposite is true. We talk to our partner about this who then alludes to yet another piece of research that suggests something different entirely. And our sense of what is true becomes muffled under the weight of humanity’s fear that comes with embracing the mystery… the unanswerable. We journey on rickety terrain, in pursuance of something that can’t be held tightly, understood fully, shaped, moulded, controlled. The quest for certainty is futile.

And I am led to where I feel our trust needs to lie. Perhaps there is somewhere that lies deep inside all mankind that knows the truth, and that therefore our trust needs to be rooted in who we are, and a reliance on what we have deep in that place that no one sees. A place we can trust for all the answers we fervently seek. And perhaps our journey involves gently unpeeling the layers of experience that have served to help us survive – to protect, to defend, to guard… whatever that means.

Because my own personal struggle with trust is trust in myself.

And the journey through the grapple very much involves the mystery I talked about earlier on. How do I get better at embracing and finding peace in the mystery? That which I trust to be true but can’t hold tightly in my hands. How do I get better at finding, listening to and giving space to that small voice inside that has become muffled under the weight of experience?

My belief is that there is something, someone greater that can be trusted, a God that made me and that feeds, equips and speaks to that part of me. But I have a choice, a responsibility to listen, to connect, to move.

So I think the answer is to feel the fear and do it anyway. Not judge the fear, not push it away. But feel it… really feel it. And trust that at the collective heart of humanity is truth, in all its fullness.

~ By Emily