Sea Eggs Abound

This photo was taken of my oldest sister, Karen and me on Grand Anse Beach in Grenada. I must have been about two or three years old at the time. In the picture, I am leaping off the wharf into Karen’s arms: who is standing below with her arms extended up to catch me.

If you look closely, you can see that Karen is standing in about an ankle’s height of water. this foretells a collision of bodies and not a swooping, swishing, submerging dip in warm seawater.

There is a sign on the wharf that says: Warning To Bathers! Do not stand on Reefs or Dark spots, black Sea Eggs abound.

Even though I truly believe that my life is blessed, and I thank the gods daily for this, there are many similarities between what is happening in this picture and what I think life is all about:

• be careful whose arms you jump into
• not all landings run smoothly
• intrinsically, there is joy in leaping into the unknown even though there are always very real dangers present

When I contemplate this photo, what I see in all of its wonderful graininess is a young girl’s ability to trust; something that I seem to have lost along the way.

As some of you know, the last eight years have been challenging ones in my life. My father’s death marked the start of a long journey into uncertainty and chaos. I wish I could report that I faced the many challenges bravely and gracefully. Kicking-and-screaming-all-the-way would be a better description of my utilised survival strategy.

Remarkably, mercifully, I did manage to learn some excellent lessons along the way:

• anger and bitterness are cloaks for fear and loss. An important step to ridding myself of anger is to define and mourn what it was that I’ve lost
• continual and constant success in plotting out my life’s course, is not a measure of a life well lived. Rather, learning to accept the failures as quietly as possible, and with as much dignity as I can muster, makes me the mensch I am meant to be
• do not stop dreaming
• learning who my authentic self is, starts with the knowledge that I am enough just the way I am

To be sure, these are all very important essential lessons to learn. Yet, only recently have I come to realise that without trust, I’ll never learn to take magnificent leaps of faith again, as I did all those years ago in Grenada.

This fact set me off searching (googling) for philosophical explanations about just what trust is. (This is one of the first times in my life I actually did a virtual search rather than read books, talk to friends, or just sit quietly mulling things in my brain.) What I came up with was fascinating. For instance, in this one article there were the following points:

“Trust is an attitude that we have towards people whom we hope will be trustworthy, where trustworthiness is a property, not an attitude.”

“One's attitude is conducive to trust if it conveys the following: an acceptance of risk, especially the risk of being betrayed; an inclination to expect the best of the other person (at least in domains in which one trusts him or her); and the belief or optimism that this person is competent in certain respects.”

Essentially, in order to trust someone, you have to believe in the person’s commitment as well as their competence. This explanation might be very obvious to many of you, but it has given me a whole new outlook on what it means to trust.

I, wrongly, believed I could implicitly trust anyone whom I love and care for. This assumption has lead to serious disillusionment. For instance, I trusted some of my family members to manage certain matters since my father died, which they subsequently failed to do. This does not necessarily mean they aren’t committed to our relationship, but rather, they did not possess the competence to manage the matters properly.

I am not sure what this all means at the present point in time. All that I know is that it does mean something. The reason that I sense there is an importance is because I have known people in my life who were trustworthy to the core of their being. My father was one of those.

Today is Father’s Day in Canada and the States. This article is dedicated to my dear father. He was someone I trusted implicitly with my life (literally), and he never failed me once. I hope dearly that my children will be able to say the same of me, when they (finally) grow up and question what trust is.