#BlogElul Trust

I know I'm about a million of these blog posts behind, but I'm up a bit early and so I thought I'd knock some out on a day which will mostly be spent traveling back to the West Coast. I apologize if some of the pages seem like variations on a theme, but I'll try to make each as original as possible!

Trust is a big one for me--as someone who, in the past was entirely too trusting and believed in people (each person started at 100%), it took me a remarkably long time to realize that one shouldn't so easily place trust in all people--that it is a valuable commodity and should be used, if not sparingly, then at the very least, discerningly.

Trust, for me, is completely subjective. I choose who, when, how much, and what to trust in my life--and it's a fine balance these days where privacy is no longer an option, but intimacy still very much is. The people I know and trust are privy to the much deeper parts of my life: the worries, the embarrassing jokes, the struggles, the family, and the other things that I won't let come out at first glance. Intimacy in itself carries a large weight of trust--mostly because it involves a large amount of choice: you need to trust that the people you choose to be intimate with (physically or otherwise) are going to be what you need them to be. You want to trust that the information that you get in the outside world is accurate and honest. You hope that the trust that others have in you is not misplaced (especially when it comes to giving directions!).

It's an interesting word--"trust"--and often implies an off-kilter balance, an assumption that the person that you are choosing to believe, or the situation that you are estimating about will work itself out. For such a state of imbalance, I try to be careful with the way I distribute its weight--and make sure that the heaviest pieces are heard and held by the strongest supports.