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The Power of Mutual Trust

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Every kind of peaceful cooperation among (men) is primarily based on mutual trust and only secondarily on institutions such as courts of justice and police. –Albert Einstein

Quotes can be a wonderful way to slow us down and have us ponder. Thinking about it, when a group of people are working on something together, more can be accomplished and more quickly when they share a high level of trust. Trust takes time to develop as many of us know. Trust means we can rely on each other, that there is a shared understanding and respect, enhancing the cooperation and communication. Trust is foundational to genuine and solid relationships, at both the micro and macro levels.

Do we engage in the same way with those we do not trust? Trust partly grows over time and experience with a person or situation. Did we take trust for granted in our past? Is trust harder to gain these days? Growing up forty or more years ago did we live in a world where we mostly trusted people, from our parents, to friends, to any of the professionals or leaders we encountered? Or maybe trust wasn’t as common as some of us thought.

Does trust in our day-to-day life seem the same or different? Is it absent in some situations that we used to trust implicitly and now those same situations we question? One assumes we still share mutual trust with the people in our orbit we have trusted over the years. Do we?

Are we more careful now in terms of trust as we meet new people and do new things? In tumultuous times a lot depends on each one of us and how we choose to act and engage. If mutual trust is the basis for peaceful cooperation, it speaks to the powerful impact of trust, and that of being a trustworthy person.

The Idea of Deserving

Anne 2 Comments

In reading the novel “Sister of My Heart” by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, a line on page 301 stood out.

“… love is never about deserving, is it? Nor is hate. “

Whether this sounds like a truism or not, it seemed curious enough to ponder. We might not often think about the deserving part of feelings, like love and hate. In terms of deserving hate, what came to mind were the innocent or unprovoked ways one might be on the receiving end, like being born a certain way or in a certain place. How do these feelings manifest?

Years ago a sociology professor discussing “isms” tried to illustrate the value of being aware of our own personal worldviews. She described the worldview as the individual lens we each see through and filter our own experiences. Whether we grew up in a nuclear family, orphanage, poor, well off, healthy, sickly, male, female, skin color, country of origin etc, all those things and more make up our personal worldview and “biases” through which we experience the world. We may not want to change our worldview, but it seems important to understand what it is and own it. Our choices and behaviors emerge from our specific worldview, a worldview if not examined, we might think is everyone’s way of thinking, feeling, or responding.

We might be acting on an unexamined feeling or bias, one particular to ourselves; a micro experience rather than a larger shared view. For instance, maybe we had a strong experience with a red-haired person. We might then have an unexplored bias against anyone with red hair; maybe an aversion, never hired them, dated them etc..Or the opposite. A bias towards red haired people. Whichever, we had a feeling and then acting on it, in this case, affecting our response to red haired people.

“Knowledge is power” as the saying goes. And another one (Plato?) is “An unexamined life isn’t worth living.” Circling back on this notion …” love is not about deserving it, nor is hate.” It takes courage to invest in self-knowledge, to understand our motivations and our worldview, whether we want to make changes or not. At least we might better understand our own “love and hate” responses.