Monday 22 October 2018

The Lahore Journal #1: Learning to trust: Preamble

What’s so special about trust anyway.

Honestly, I was fairly flippant with it as a kid.

Trusted everyone, anyone. I still do. Then later on after a few let downs, I learnt the craft of just giving people the impression that I trusted them. Man, those let downs were painful. But the kid's instinct in me still remained.

So I find myself asking is trust really all it's meant to be. Particularly when other people start to try and control how and who I should trust.

When being told to not trust someone it feels like a conspiracy theory. An episode out of the X-Files or a James Bond movie. It's as if there’s a sense that there's yet-to-be-determined body of evidence out there waiting to justify, incriminate or demonstrate who not to trust to reveal their infamy.

The problem I have, including being told what to think at the best of times, with this is: it bugs me.

It bugs me that we learn to be suspicious and that eventually our experience teaches us to adopt a protect yourself mindset. Protect your body. Protect your mind. Protect and by all means temper your hope. Dp not get too vulnerable.

It bugs me that we have to admit that this mindset is right and correct. It will protect us. keep you safe from being let down or whispering "I told you so".

It bugs me that in the same breath we yearn for breakthroughs of peace and pathways pioneered by others who are risking harm and their lives to show that we don’t have to be suspicious.

... and that's the real conflict: bad people, bad realties, exploitation, manipulation (AKA the real world) vs the hope that we have each other’s backs... and that we would help each other at the crucial moment (AKA the world we'd love to live in).

I hate it because its the norm I don’t want.

So when my own father warns me to temper my trust. It bugs me.

His intentions are nothing but sound. His love is nothing but real for his littlest son. I would most likely be the same. My wife often tells me that I’m very trusting and says it’s ‘a lovely thing’. She says it in such a way that makes me feel like I'm a bit innocent of reality. Just like my father is when he tells me not to trust people.

I’m heading to Pakistan. It’s the neighbour of India (my ethnic motherland). India and Pakistan hate each other. Or so I’m told.

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