trust

I'll probably never arm-wrestles the topic into a newspaper column, so I guess I will let it out of the starting gate here ... in the privacy of my own slovenly home... the question of trust.

As far as I can figure out, there is an unremitting desire to feel the warming waters of trust. It soothes the soul. It warms the cockles. In the midst of uncertainty trust is relaxed and at peace with something or someone. Trust is a place or time where doubt is erased and comfort kicks in. I'm talking gut-level stuff here, not dictionary stuff.

An Internet dictionary offers this partial approach:

-- a feeling of confidence in someone that shows you believe they are honest, fair, and reliable

-- confidence that something is safe, reliable, or effective

Trust. Cops want it and so do criminals. Politicians court and sometimes lie in order to cement it. Spouses and religious devotees may lay claim to it. Farmers and stock brokers and young mothers and old codgers all seek out little and large homesteads of trust. To trust may prove dangerous, but the alternative of distrusting each and every segment of life that comes down the pike is both exhausting and impossible.

There's just got to be something trustworthy and even if there's not, still ... well ... I guess each picks his or her own version. Buddhists trust, for example, that all things change and their sometimes smug assertion is hard to contradict. But is it trustworthy?

A resting place. Someplace that requires no energy. A bit of peace. Just one small moment that devolves drip by drop into this moment -- a point at which the matter of trust is irrelevant.

There have been people I trusted. And on the sociological big screen, I used to trust the U.S. Supreme Court and the magazine "Consumer Reports." Maybe the Buddhist "enlightenment" is worth trusting, but how could I know that without first being enlightened?

It's a strange duck, trust.