There must be trust

Talk about it

What is this world’s most precious commodity? Is it silver, uranium, oil, diamonds or gold? No, it’s trust.

Trust? That’s right. The dictionary tells us that trust is a confident expectation of something or that it is reliance on another person or entity.

Some synonyms of trust are sureness, assurance, conviction, credence, credit, certainty, expectation, positiveness and faith.

Does anyone use any of those words to describe you? If they don’t, your life is thus far a failure, even if you have washboard abs, 10 oil wells, two diamond mines, $1 billion in the bank, your girlfriends are Kim Kardashian and Lady Gaga (or you’re the latest George Clooney’s fling) and your wife is Heidi Klum.

Having lived in Los Angeles for 20-plus years, I can tell you that when a native Californian says they will meet you at a restaurant at 8 p.m., they may or they may not. That’s just the way it is in Hollyweird. Trust doesn’t hold much value there.

If a native North Dakotan says that they’ll meet you on a rock on top of a hill 40 miles north of Medora, at a place you can only get to by hiking or on horseback at 2 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, they’ll be there at 1:30 p.m. with a thermos full of coffee and Tupperware bulging with freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. That’s just the way it is. Trust means a whole lot more here.

Of course, this might have something to do with the fact that in North Dakota, weird is just weird while being weird in California is normal.

George MacDonald, the Scottish author, poet and Christian minister who lived from 1824 to 1905, once said. “To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.”

You see, love can exist without trust but the relationship can’t.

Author Ernest Hemmingway said, “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

But we hate having to trust people, don’t we? It makes us so vulnerable and people can take advantage of that and sometimes do.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it’s the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him with his friend.”

It’s easy to make friends. It’s a lot harder to keep them for a long time, because all relationships depend on trust and if you keep turning over friends you might need to check your trust meter.

But let’s face it, we do have to trust a lot of people and things every day: the cereal maker, the bread toaster, your hot water heater, your shower drain, iron, electric razor, coffee maker, the legs on the chair you sit in, the steel beams in your three-story building, maybe the weatherman, the front tires on your car and the drivers zooming by you in the opposite direction just inches away.

I recently trusted a chef to prepare my steak medium rare and it was placed in front of me looking more like charcoal. I once briefly trusted a little old lady in Pasadena, Calif. but she turned left in front of me at an intersection and we collided head-on.

Her name was Frona Mae and when I walked over to her driver’s side window to see if she was OK she said, “Well the light was green.” To which I replied, “Yes, it often is, but we still try to yield to oncoming traffic.”

Fortunately there were no injuries.

Peter Pan said, “All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust.”

This is a little scary because trust can mean many things but mostly it means risk and who likes risk? So, if you say you’re not a gambler, you’re a liar because trust demands that you gamble and thus the best way to gamble is probably to minimize the risk.

Oscar Wilde, the Irish writer and poet suggested that one should never trust a woman who tells one her real age because a woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.

I’m guessing Wilde was part of a relationship that ended badly. Haven’t we all been? Nevertheless, keep the faith Dude, because it is life’s most precious commodity, next to trust.

Holten is a freelance columnist and cartoonist from Dickinson.

Tags: opinion, column, columns