There are fundamentally two ways of trusting people in general.

One is to begin at 0%. You wait and watch, often with scepticism, occasionally even cynicism.

Trust here is something you earn and the other person must or must not do a set of things to deserve every incremental unit of it.

Every thing done in line with the implicit expectations of the relationship earns the other party a brownie point.

An occasional slip may be accommodated but the piggy bank never really has enough inside to be fully realized.

There is of course, good reason for us to operate from this space. You have been there and done that. You are battle hardened. You are weary and exhausted with everything that you know about yourself and about human beings in general.

Thing with building trust in this manner is that trust here is not unlike an ageing pimple that goes bust with little or no outside interference.

The second way to trust is to begin by wiping the slate clean each time. To begin a new relationship with an unfettered and unconditional gift of trust. Full battery. A hundred percent. This can change very quickly depending on what manifests. This does not mean you trust someone blindly.

This process mandates that we first trust ourselves to know when things need to change. That we learn the lessons of our previous experiences without over learning them. That we know that all of us are damaged goods and at all times a work in progress. That we don’t hold the universe at ransom for what are random, piece meal experiences.

To be trusted is often a bigger compliment than to be loved. Suffering from an inability to trust is about as tragic as suffering from having trusted too much.