A Question of Trust
When I was young, my sister and I would often be found playing with our neighbours. I have fond but vague memories of that time and a boy who lived around the corner. He was older than the oldest among us which made him a teenager. My child-brain wondered why he would bother with us while at the same time loving that he did. Whether he was just killing time or wasn’t quite ready to give up being a kid himself didn’t matter to me, I remember him as being funny and brave. Funny because his jokes were never meant to mock us and brave because he used to lay across the road when a car turned the corner. Even though his next actions – getting up, hopping in the backseat and driving off without a good-bye – revealed his secret, I was in awe.
Throughout my life, I have been surrounded by ‘What ifs’. Back then, I wondered ‘what if the brakes didn’t work?’, ‘what if his dad didn’t hit the brake fast enough?’, ‘what if the car malfunctioned and lurched forward to crush him?’. He trusted none of those things would happen and they never did. I hear he is a wealthy businessman now and happily married.
Whenever I think of him, I think of that moment of pure trust. Trust in his father, trust in the mechanics of the vehicle, and trust in the automakers (designers, manufacturers, assembly line workers, safety technicians, etc.). I’m certain at his age, he wasn’t considering all those factors but rather wanted to shock the kids around the corner for a laugh. Even so, to accomplish his goal, he had to trust.
My beloved Chambers dictionary offers the expected definitions of the word ‘trust’ – reliance, fidelity, a resting on the integrity of another – but they also included ‘ground of confidence’. That struck me. If trust is the foundation of confidence, all the encouragement in the world cannot build confidence without it. It explained a great deal about how I have lived to this point and how my inability to trust eroded the foundation of confidence within me.
Having been vaguely aware that trust – as both noun and verb – was a challenge for me outside of family, it has only become acute in the last few years. In that time, I considered how to face the antithesis of trust – Doubt – and overcome it but hadn’t devised a successful plan until the world stopped in the wake of a pandemic. As it happens, when the way the world works changes so drastically, the way one functions within it changes too and I was no different. I mustered up the courage to put myself in a position to trust. It wasn’t easy. I cried a lot and often. I felt awkward and uncomfortable. I was scared. I was angry. I wanted to back out, return to previous patterns that felt safe.
There wasn’t a specific day where the clouds parted, light poured down and I was suddenly trusting. I wasn’t touched by a fairy godmother’s magic wand or dove into sacred water to cleanse myself of doubt. It’s work. Day by day, hour by hour, it is hard work. It is a choice I made actively and without hesitation and now I am trusting, in small ways. Though I am not likely to ever lay down on the asphalt in front of moving vehicles, now when Doubt taps on my shoulder eager to tear apart my ‘ground of confidence’, I take its bony hand in my own, kiss it gently and simply say, ‘Not today’.
