“First off, don’t let the force of the impression carry you away. Say to it, ‘hold up a bit and let me see who you are and where you are from–let me put you to the test’....”
Epictetus, Discourses, 2.18.24
Oh, dear God. There's probably a lot of things going on in my mind lately that writing eludes me. Usually it comforts the chaos within me, makes sense of the inner turmoil, but right now, it’s just not happening. I guess everything really does come into a territory sometimes.
I have been trying to write about ‘Trust’ since last night and apparently I couldn’t. When one truly doesn’t understand something, it makes it difficult for one to expound on it and communicate it to others. I literally have to pick up Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” to get some inspiration, (It’s a book addressing female writers or maybe writers in general. At least, that’s what I get from it) and thank God, I did. This curious appeal marked me: “I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.” So maybe that’s the problem. I am trying to just write for the sake of it without actually living something out first. Focusing solely on the abstract definition of the word is one thing but it doesn’t give life to an already intangible concept.
Trust is such a difficult noun to grasp. Just like most intangible things, it is something that you probably know what it is but not completely understand. And when you turn it into a verb, it gets even more complicated. As emotional beings, with years of experience and knowledge of the world plus subjective prejudices, stereotypes and assumptions, “trusting” is almost always never objective.
Personally speaking, I have conflicting thoughts about trusting people. It’s like I want to be more open to the idea of it but fear hinders me from doing so. Previous experiences made me wary of it and I feel like it’s more important to protect myself than to improve social connections and/or relationships. BUT, of course, I acknowledge that this is going to be a big problem of mine in the long run. This fear of trusting others can be an isolating shackle that inhibits me from enjoying life to the fullest and for having meaningful connections. And as a 20% hedonist, that would be a gargantuan dilemma for me.
The best way I can describe it is like this:
Imagine if our ancient ancestors just decided to stop exploring the idea of fire and what it can actually do after a particularly painful encounter with it. Let’s just say that one Australopithecus sediba, let’s call her ‘Erica’, just happened to come too close to a wildfire. She and her family (or friends, or commune, or whatever), live near or within a dense forest in the now continent of Africa. She was so fascinated by the fire because it was her first time seeing it. Being quite curious, she came close and felt that it was warm. That was delightful for her so she came even closer. She was so excited so she just decided to go and dive in. Fist and arm, point blank period. You can’t blame her though because (1) it was her first time so she doesn’t have any prior experience on it and (2) she just has a particularly small cranial capacity.
As you would expect, she got a third-degree burn. She went running back to her friends to show her white and charred upper limb, bone showing even. For some reason, she didn’t die. Maybe out of luck or sheer goodness from an unknown celestial being. So now, there was this walking Australopithecus sediba with an injury from the fire for all to see. What happened to her spread like wildfire (no pun intended). Not only to her species but also to the emerging Homo species in town. The H. ergaster were in utter shock, just like their Spanish cousins, the H. antecessor. They swore amongst themselves that they will stay away from the fire because they could be that poor Erica.
The fear passed through evolution and the now emerging H. erectus believes the same. Their elders, the H. ergaster, indubitably claimed that fire is bad news, that they shouldn’t dabble with it. (I know that there are still some debates whether H. ergaster is a separate specie or just a sub specie of H. erectus but for the sake of this illustration, let’s just follow the Geologic timeline of their emergence and carbon dating of the ‘human’ fossils). AND so, the controlled use of fire never came to be. NOTHING HAPPENED. No cooked food, no smelting. The Industrial Revolution was just a distant dream.
That was quite fun to write and I got a little bit sidetracked there. The gist of that whole narrative is this: sure, you’ll get stitches and burn when you trust someone but it doesn’t mean that you should stop doing it altogether after getting hurt. There are a lot of things that you won’t enjoy in life if you just isolate yourself because you’re afraid of getting hurt again. First and foremost, not all people, and in extension–experiences, are the same. You can’t always assume that the same thing will happen because you’re just inviting bad shit in your life. As a scientist, it baffled me that a lot of people subscribe to the idea of a “Law of Attraction” when it has no empirical evidence. Even using “Law” there is rather arbitrary because it means that it is true, no question about it, proven and tested. But I guess the proponent is not really talking about how we can attract superficial things such as wealth and fame. I think it’s more about how one wields the power to change everything around them because of sheer will and internal desire to be positive. It has something to do with vibrations and energies. That your thoughts tend to attract similar results. That is something I can agree with. You attract the good things because you are only focused on seeing the good things.
Trusting is a tedious thing to do. It forces you to be vulnerable, literally opening yourself up to the possibility of pain and suffering. But I think we just really have to do that leap of faith if it makes sense. Of course, I am not saying to just trust blindly. That’s just dumb. You have to ‘verify’ if what’s in front of you is worthwhile and whether or not you're just afraid or the person/situation is actually bad news. You need to have that discernment that comes from experiences you have already contemplated on and what the thing in front of you is consistently showing you. At the end of the day, we just have to believe this famous adage of Theodore Roosevelt, “Nothing worth having comes easy.” Everything has a price and you just have to decide if you want to pay it because it's worth it.
The real Alpha
