Intentional Society: The speed of trust
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What is the speed of trust? If trust is a feeling, those can arise or shift quickly: witness the speed of an angry reaction, or how fast we relax in the company of a good friend. If trust is a kind of capital, a bank account of experiences, then building it takes time and many deposits of various sizes to swell the balance.
I think it's both of those types of things (and maybe more besides that). You can walk into a room, feel the vibes, and pick up a state of trust from the culture already present, in which you may lean on your trust of that social network and e.g. share openly, trusting that people will listen and respond kindly. At least, up to a certain point! You can sense a different kind/type/level of trust when you consider deeper vulnerability, such as trusting someone with care of your kids, your house, your savings — those seem like they require capital trust reserves of a kind exemplified by a marriage or long-term relationship.
Trust seems very embodied. You can't decide, with your logical mind, to change the degree to which you trust someone. (I mean you can convince yourself a bit, but how well does that really work?) Trust is held in the "soft animal of your body" as a somatic integration of experiences and non-verbal wisdom. With some people, you can reach very deep trust very quickly (comparatively) when you seem to align and connect on all levels, all frequencies resonating. With others, you may view trust as a long hard slog of building up bit after bit of shared ground, starting from very different places originally.
Trust can breed trust, in a feedback loop of actions feeding feelings enabling more actions etc. But where does that come from, if we're not "doing" it with our conscious decisions? This points to an elephant-and-the-rider type of collaboration between our awareness and our subconscious selves: We can choose to hold ourselves open towards the possibility of establishing and building trust, and from there let our "soft body" do what it does well. If we listen to and trust our gut, our minds can function as a great helper in executing the right actions according to our trust-sensing wisdom. But the frame feels like "letting" trust be what it is and grow on its own, rather than "doing" trust or "building" it like a house.
This has been a looong lead-in to gesturing at a specific feeling of pride and amazement I sensed in last week's Noticing time, observing the depth of sharing, the openness, the lack of social fears (even when talking about inner fears) — in short, the trust in the room. It seems quite remarkable, given the default trust-building-rate of just a weekly video call, that it felt so strong to my senses within our relational field. I note the different types of trust above to point out that feeling trust in presence is not the same thing as commitment type trust — but I'm so curious about what this cultural container will unlock in letting our soft wisdom love what it loves.
Cheers, James
P.S. I plan to write about the Relating Languages next week, after our next practice session.