Earned but Recently Given

Trust. Who ever would have thought that five little letters would have so much meaning? When you trust someone, you're putting your faith in them to do what's right. You are relying on their integrity. When someone you trust breaks that faith, the effects can be devastating to both parties. Families break apart, wars are waged and lives are changed forever over trust or, perhaps more importantly, the lack thereof.

It used to be that you sought advice from a trusted inner circle of advisers, usually family and friends. When your question was out of their depth you sought the advice of another trusted professional, like a doctor for a medical opinion or a lawyer for a legal one. We trusted who we knew and we knew who we trusted. The world was very small. Granted, when one of these advisers gave bad counsel, you didn't have a whole lot of other sources to turn to, so things could get a little sticky. I used to know someone who got terrible haircuts, repeatedly, because he didn't want to learn to trust a new barber.

But now we don't trust the people we know, or at least not as explicitly as we used to. Instead, we trust the internet. The idea is kind of laughable, really. I just typed "pink elephants grow on trees" and now if you search for that on Google, you'll (eventually, give the webcrawlers a day or two and then scroll a bit) get a link to this post. Go ahead, you can check. I'll wait... See! It must be true, someone said so on the internet. The internet we're all using right now has made the world much larger.

But has it really?

The last time you went to the Doctor you went home and Googled the advice they gave you, didn't you? A highly trained, highly paid professional and you double-checked what they had to say with the same source that just told you pink elephants grow on trees. In other words, you no longer trust your doctor. For some of you, this is a person you have known for decades. I'll bet the same goes for your lawyer, or your financial adviser or your BFF. Maybe the world is actually smaller, or at least less familiar. I'm not suggesting that anyone stops learning more about themselves or the world around them. But maybe we should all, once in a while, trust the actual person in front of us to have our best interests at heart.

Unless pink elephants really DO grow on trees. In which case we have way bigger fish to fry. I'm pretty sure the weight of an elephant could do some serious damage to a tree!


This post is part of GBE2. Week #13 Challenge - TRUST.. For more info, click here.