On Building Trust - and Building Houses
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This intriguing graphic was found in
this article on trust
models by Paul English |
"She had never been able to tolerate dishonesty, which she thought threatened
the very heart of relationships between people. If you could not count on
other people to mean what they said, or to do what they said they would do,
then life could become utterly unpredictable. The fact that we could trust
one another made it possible to undertake the simple tasks of life. Everything
was based on trust, even day-to-day things like crossing the road
which required trust that the drivers of cars would be paying attention
to buying food from a roadside vendor, whom you trusted not to poison you.
It was a lesson that we learned as children, when our parents threw us up
into the sky and thrilled us by letting us drop into their waiting arms.
We trusted those arms to be there, and they were."
From "The Full Cupboard of Life", by Alexander McCall Smith, p. 62
We are all living in a time when we are forced to watch the steady erosion
of trust between people. War always increases distrust and our new state
of perpetual war promises to continue to sacrifice trust in the name of security
(fear). It is surely the erosion of this trust that threatens the civility
of life more than the actuarial threat of a terrorist act.
Trust is the mild mannered little brother of love. It is a freely given and
received type of mini-love that forms the foundation of all our greater emotions
and feelings. Citizenship, grace and respect all imply the granting of a
high degree of trust. Civilization itself cannot exist without the assumed
and unspoken shared trust we extend to and receive from others in the daily
business of life.
Many people have an interest in moving to a smaller town or country location
and then building or remodeling a house to live in. This dream is often based
on a desire to simplify a life that has grown too complex, but it is also
an unspoken desire to increase the amount of trust in our lives.
Often the dream of building ones own house starts as an exercise in
self-sufficiency - we imagine ourselves fashioning our own shelter with our
own two hands. Only later, as the complexity of the project grows, do we
come to understand all the help we will need and that much of this
help comes from a complex web of interactions based on trust.
I might help my neighbor unload a tiller and he tells me about his
cousin who has a trencher I can use for my waterline.
A casual conversation at the lumber yard gives you a lead on a painter
or roofer who knows just how to do what you were talking about.
I get to know the community and the community gets to know me through the
people I hire and buy materials from. I get a reputation for fairness (or
not) and I am treated the same way by those who will help me build my dream.
This is why the process of building your own house is such a life changing
experience. Many of us who try it look back on the time spent as one of the
most engaging things we have ever done. The levels of aliveness you feel
during the times you are working this "network of trust" are hard to match
in the normal work-a-day world. You are spending money fast - and that in
itself is exciting - but you are also providing income, encouraging creativity
and making friends with those who are working on the project with you. You
are growing, the project is growing and you are helping others to grow. Is
this not the definition of win-win?
If you are "trust-worthy", and the people you hire are also trustworthy,
then you will find that you can build using an unspoken network that still
exists in many smaller communities. This network can often replace many of
the competitively bid hard contracts that come from the world of lawyers.
Agreements of trust are flexible, responsive and interactive - they
start with a feeling of shared empathy.
Legal contracts are rigid, authoritarian and combative - they come
from a feeling of fear.
The best you can hope for from LawyerLand is the feeling of winning or beating
out the other guy. This is a bitter and sad substitute for knitting yourself
into your new community and making those three of four new lifetime friends
that always seem to come out of a house project.
Instead of contracts, how about writing up and signing
an "understanding of project expectations" or some such thing?
If your goal is a full and rich life, I vote for exploring the model of trust.
The rewards of the process are likely to far outweigh the few times when
trust was extended and not reciprocated. Allow yourself to be made the fool
of once in a while. If you can let the bitterness slip away unanswered it
won't taint your ability to trust again.
Isn't this also the time-tested recipe for finding love and building long-lasting
relationships?
Related article:
Politics
Made Easy |