Life starts with trust

We do things every day that require trust. Think of how you have to trust that your brakes work in your car when you apply the pedal. You trust in the pilot when you buckle up for your plane flight. A visually impaired person has to trust their guide dog or their walking cane.

United States of America coined the saying ‘In God We Trust’ – it’s even on their money. Couldn’t be any better than that. Do you think they all believe it and do it?! If trust had been that easy for me, gee, life would have been a lot cruisier.

Unwavering trust is a rare and a precious thing. It needs the courage of a champion to bring out the miracles of life that come from trust.

We are born knowing how to trust, because little babies have to trust their parents. They have no other way of survival. That’s why it hurts the whole of society when an adult has broken the trust of a child who doesn’t deserve it and can’t do anything about it. That harmed child learns to stop trusting.

For many of us as we grow older, whether we were seriously harmed as a child or not, the world’s ways teach us not to trust.

I grew to believe that trust was all about a deal, and whether the other bloke would hold up his part of the deal – a little battle of two minds, like a competition. My mistrusting moments helped develop my hard-core expectancy not to trust anything you hear or see until the person proves himself to you.

I lived with the expectancy that someone would try to get at me or rip me off. Being a bloke, I thought I had to get up earlier than the other bloke and be head smart. I didn’t want to take too many chances with people because I had a fear of getting dudded. I couldn’t see that trust was something deeper than my thoughts and actions.

I took aboard distrust of authority while doing my compulsory 2-year army training. Not all in authority were in the distrust club, but there were a couple who really sent my distrust indicator in the wrong direction. I had trouble trusting authority for a long time afterwards. Their word was not their word. I still battle if it resurfaces to this day, even though I thought I’d shed the layers of distrust and was free. I hate it when I see a misuse of authority.

Our political leadership can also damage our trust. Some politicians can publicly go against what they have promised without apologising for it. They just help us as a society to have less trust in the system we live under.

So looking back I had lots of mistrust. I developed a fear to trust. It was all about me and my brain. I wasn’t taught or encouraged to let go with my heart, or taught that trust comes from deep within the core of my big turbocharged ticker.

How are you going with this one? If you don’t trust anybody you’ll have to live like an island. You’ll spend all your time watching every which way, and get too consumed by it. You’ll be spending too much time in an area you don’t need to, so other areas of champion life get neglected.