I Trust You

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” – Ernest Hemingway

One of the lovely things about our retreat center in Costa Rica (The Sanctuary) was that you had to walk almost a mile and across two shallow rivers several times in order to enter or leave the property. We usually did this in pairs or groups, but one day I found myself walking this river path alone on the way back from one of our excursions. At the last crossing, I was approached by a shirtless man who was wearing one shoe and had a piece of cloth wrapped around his other foot. My Spanish is rudimentary and his English wasn’t much better, but he somehow communicated to me that he had lost a sandal at a nearby waterfall and needed a ride to the car-park gate at the origin of the property. It hurt him to walk on his bare foot, he gestured, so he had wrapped his t-shirt around it. I weighed the danger of trusting this stranger, but my gut told me he was telling the truth. I beckoned for him to join me on my last leg to The Sanctuary and hooked him up with a Spanish-speaking staff member who cheerfully drove him back to the gate.

Alarming headlines and click-bait social media posts lead many of us to believe the world is a dangerous place. Yes, we should use common sense and caution when approached by strangers—and maybe you would have turned tail and run on the river path—but I lament that more and more our instinct is not to trust rather than to trust. We no longer trust politicians, scientists, police officers, foreigners, the media or our neighbors. This growing lack of trust is having dire effects on our social capital and personal relationships.

Our collective yearning to live in a society where we rely on and trust one another is discussed in a Free Press article by Bob Henderson about HBO’s The Last of Us. These days, writes Henderson, we tend to believe that someone must earn our trust before we can enter into a relationship with them. But that’s upside down, he says. Trust is not a precondition for cooperation; cooperation is a precondition for trust. In order to survive as a hairless, clawless, slow species, our forebears on the savannah had to cooperate. They depended on each other, which meant they had to trust each other. But modern society has reduced how much we need to rely on each other in order to stay alive, so we’re freer not to trust each other.

Yoga gives us tools to connect with ourselves and with each other. It teaches us to trust the wisdom of our bodies. Its essence is a state of union with all things and a method for realizing interconnectedness. Without trust, this interconnection, which is vital to our survival, becomes greatly diminished.

To me, that’s more frightening than a shirtless stranger.