May: Trust & Uncertainty
Imagine a trust in yourself,
or another person, or in life itself,
that doesn’t need to be
proved and demonstrated,
that is able to contain uncertainty.
—Thomas Moore
Spring has always been about trust for me. The return of light and color to our world as we get closer to the sun reminds me every year to trust that our earth keeps spinning, keeps orbiting our star.
A few years ago, I got curious about what my existential dread in the dead of winter was really about. Was it the cold? The darkness? What exactly was it that made waking up on some of those dreary days so outrageously difficult?
When I excavated past the vitamin D deficiency and the low mood, what I discovered was a fear that every winter would be permanent, that the sun and the flowers would never return in their full splendor. But, just like we learn in the Persephone and Demeter story from Greek mythology, nature’s cycles always carry on. The short days grow longer. The flowers come back.
Of course, not every flower returns. I’ve certainly grieved perennials lost in a winter frost that don’t enjoy their glorious resurrection come springtime. This is why I appreciate the wisdom of Thomas Moore’s writing, which I noted above. A supple, flexible trust always somewhat paradoxically must include the possibility that what we don’t want to happen sometimes does.
Trust is a big topic that we could take in many different directions, so taking a cue from Moore, I’d like to focus on three specific ways of practicing trust that I find to be helpful for a lot of people, myself included: trusting ourselves, others, and life itself.
Trusting Ourselves
If there is one area I see as a common struggle among clients in my therapy practice, one that transcends class, race, and gender bounds, it is a difficulty in trusting the self.
Why is that? What makes it hard for so many people, no matter who they are or where they come from, to trust themselves? These are a few of the most common reasons for struggling with self-trust in adulthood:
getting punished for expressing opinions or emotions in childhood and adolescence,
not being allowed to engage in productive struggle or to make mistakes, and
having a strong inner critic that convinces you that you can’t trust yourself based on a history of “bad decision making.”
If we have trouble trusting ourselves, what can we do about it? I believe we can start by forming a relationship with ourselves, one that is infused with the knowing that sometimes we may perceive that we’ve made a “wrong” decision and accepting this as part of our human nature.
Dick Schwartz, the founder of Internal Family Systems therapy, states that we often think our first relationships in the world are with our parents or the people who raised us, but that actually our first relationship is with our self. Parents, siblings, and everyone else come after that. This idea was revolutionary for me when I first heard it.
For a lot of us, it is a matter of first realizing that we can even have a relationship with ourselves. And then it is from that place that self trust can flow.
To create more self trust, I often recommend that people start with the simplest daily decisions and just move through them in a new way. Instead of unconsciously picking out their breakfast, their clothing, or their commute to work, I encourage them to slow down and consciously ask: what does my body want to eat today? Do I think I’ll feel better wearing purple or brown? Would I like to bicycle or drive to the office?
And even then, when we make decisions consciously, we sometimes regret them later. I chose the brown sweater but keep thinking of the purple one all day, wishing I’d picked that one. The sweater example is a low-stakes way of practicing increasing our distress tolerance about making “the wrong decision.” While I may wish I’d chosen the purple sweater, can I still be satisfied with the brown one?
For the bigger life decisions, the heart and the gut are often the best places we can go for guidance. There is a meditation I love in which you call to mind a big decision you’re trying to make. Then, imagine yourself seated in the middle of your brain, near the pineal gland. Witness all of the chaotic back and forth of the thinking brain, as your head attempts to sort out a big decision. Let yourself be tossed around and turned upside down by the different arguments you hear. Then, notice there is a braided silk rope in your lap. Grasp it and repel down through the midline of the body, dropping down swiftly but gently into your heart. Listen for what you hear there.
Often, the heart is a spacious and placid place, and when people drop away from the frenzied arguing and worrying of the head they are able to hear the peaceful, singular voice of the heart as it whispers its clear and gentle guidance.
Trusting Others
When I think about trusting others, I lift my gaze from our immediate circumstances and look to our global neighbors. Over the past couple of years, I have been heartened by the work of peace activists Maoz Inon, who is Israeli, and Aziz Abu Sarah, who is Palestinian. You may be familiar with their work, as they have come into the global spotlight while touring and speaking around the world. Maoz’s parents died in a rocket attack on October 7, 2023. And when Aziz was just nine years old, his brother died from internal injuries caused by Israeli soldiers. Nicknamed “Brothers in the Name of Peace,” these two men had every reason to hate one another. Instead of pursuing blame and revenge, they chose to dedicate their lives to seeking forgiveness and reconciliation. In their TED talk in the link above, they both reference moments when their trust in the goodness of others was betrayed. Not only did they weather these ruptures, they were even able to see these moments as offering them the opportunity to continue to trust.
I also think about the work of The Parents Circle Families Forum and Standing Together. Created in 1995, The Parents Circle is a joint Palestinian-Israeli organization of more than 700 families who have lost an immediate family member in the conflict. Formed in 2015, Standing Together is a progressive grassroots movement organizing Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel against the occupation and for peace, equality, and social justice.
When I think about the decades of violence and betrayal these families have survived, I am heartened by their choice to continue to trust in the goodness of one another. Their example reminds me that healing happens in community and not without its rocky moments and ruptures, whether it’s a group of 2 or 700.
Speaking of our global neighbors, you may have heard that the results of the most recent World Happiness Report are in, and Finland has been rated the world’s happiest country for the eighth year in a row. Published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, this report indexes the lives of people from 140 countries around the globe. Rankings are based on answers people give when asked to rate their own lives. It was not a surprise to me that the US has fallen to its lowest-ever position on the report, coming in at number 24.
Beyond health and wealth, researchers concluded that household size, sharing meals with others, and having strong social support networks were key determinants in the respondents’ perceptions of their lives. But there was another factor that came into focus for the researchers when they crunched the data this year: trust in the goodness of others.
Believing in the kindness of others was much more closely tied to happiness than previously thought. The report suggests that believing someone would return a lost wallet is a strong predictor of the overall happiness of a population. Finland and other Nordic nations ranked among the top places for expected and actual return of lost wallets. But elsewhere in the world, like in the US, that is not the case. Global evidence on the perceived and actual return of lost wallets shows that overall, we are far too pessimistic about the honesty and goodness of others compared to reality: actual rates of wallet return are around twice as high as people expect.
What this says to me is that we can—and perhaps, should—be trusting in others more than we are.
For those of us who have had our hearts broken and our trust betrayed, I know that believing in the kindness of others can feel not just difficult but even impossible. What a paradox the endeavor of trusting others puts us in: it’s always a risk to trust others, even when they’re well intentioned. But, isn’t it also true that our survival depends on our willingness to trust those around us? The very act that can endanger us is also necessary for us to live.
Trusting Life Itself
Kind of like the edict to “be in your body,” which I wrote about in March, the declaration to trust life itself, or another way of saying that—to trust the process—was something that eluded me for decades.
What did it mean to trust the process? How did people do that? It seemed easy to trust the process when things were going well. But what about when things didn’t turn out the way I wanted them to? How was I supposed to trust the process then?
I’ll be honest: I’m still learning to trust the process. And there are days and seasons when I still struggle to put this philosophy into practice. But, I wanted to share with you a Buddhist teaching called “Good Luck, Bad Luck. Who Knows?” which has helped me greatly in learning how to trust the process. The story goes like this:
An old Chinese farmer had tended his crops for many years. One day his only horse escaped and ran away. His neighbors came to him and exclaimed, “What bad luck! You don’t have a horse during planting season.” The farmer listened and replied, “Good luck, bad luck. Who knows?”
A few days later, the horse returned with two other horses. The neighbors exclaimed, “You are now rich! What good luck.” The farmer listened and replied, “Good luck, bad luck. Who knows?”
A few days later, the farmer’s only son was thrown from one of the horses and broke his leg. When the neighbors heard, they came to the farmer and exclaimed, “It’s planting season and now you have no one to help you! What bad luck.” The farmer listened, and, once again, said, “Good luck, bad luck. Who knows?”
The next day, the emperor’s army rode into the town and enlisted the eldest son from every family. Only the farmer’s son with his broken leg remained behind. The neighbors tearfully exclaimed, “Yours is the only son who was not sent to war. What good luck!” The farmer simply replied “Good luck, bad luck. Who knows?”
There are many different versions of this story and lots of interpretations about what its main teachings are. Is it about not making assumptions and withholding judgment? Is it about having a positive or neutral attitude no matter what is happening? Or is it a reminder to take the long view of life? For me, it is about all of these things, but most of all, it is about trusting the process, and it is a teaching that honors the wisdom that we can trust the larger unfolding of our lives amidst the uncertainty of what will happen tomorrow.
We are not able to see the future, but we can always choose to trust the process. If I can remember to trust that the light will always return and the flowers will bloom once again, perhaps I can also continue to nurture a trust in myself, my fellow human beings, and life itself, imperfect as it is.
