Trust (the process)
In which we land in places unknown
On Saturday night, I boarded a one-way flight from Boston to Dublin. It was a familiar flight, one I've taken thirty-plus times in recent years. The same seats, the same airplane tail codes, the same sprint across the Atlantic as if chased by vampires in the dead of night. It's a familiar pattern to me, but one I can now consider the end of one era and the beginning of another.
The last month has been tumultuous. Deadlines forced me to compartmentalize my life into shippable boxes. My apartment lease was terminating, utilities were set to be shut off or handed back over, my youngest child was heading off to college, and my oldest was heading into her senior year of the same. I had a scheduled one-on-one with my executive director on a Friday, and within minutes, I was summarily dismissed. Paperwork then became another item on the checklist. Emails to lawyers, conversations with kids and friends, family check-ins, and bills to pay. It seemed to be an ever-growing maelstrom. Transitions and chaos aplenty.
One could argue that this perfect storm of job loss and life transition was the ideal forge in which resiliency could be formed. I’d kindly suggest that resilience is a misused and otherwise misplaced term given to situations where no other expletives, obscenities, or fists-shaking-at-the-sky can be offered. Perhaps it’s meaningful to some, but wholly empty to others.
I landed in Ireland on a Sunday morning, clouds in the sky, concrete underfoot. My two bags came rocketing out of the baggage carousel, thankfully intact. Perhaps a good omen of a fresh start, eh?
I consider everything in my life before this a delicate balance of stumbling forward and into. It's been stretching my capacities and capabilities. For one, being married to someone across an ocean for half a decade, with only occasional visits, has focused my energy not on the affordances of contact but on communication. This reshapes the conventions of relationship to something entirely based on both the mundane and the magnificent. Eating, sleeping, and pooping suddenly become more than just biological imperatives; they're stories in and of themselves. Odd to think about, I suppose, but they are the true human elements of our everyday.
With all of these changes, personal and professional alike, you quickly come to grips with the fact that there is only one direction to go: forward. You begin to realize that what's beyond the bend is decided by a matter of trust, a faith in the unshakeable inevitability of either divine order or embodied chaos.
The road may be smooth, rocky, or otherwise indifferent to your needs and desires. It will be beset with the varieties of human experience, both intentional and not, and it'll winnow every fibre of your being. It's built for both the faint of heart and the courageous; it's truly a voyage into the unknown. It all relies on things I've written about before and things I've yet to write.
This is all easier said than done, of course. I'm two days into a future I know nothing about, but am choosing to believe in. In quiet moments, I find myself at odds with the trust I have in things "working out." I've had external votes of confidence, the "sure, you'll find something quick!"-isms, that pander to my selfish soul. I've experienced the soft touch of email messages and conversations asking if I need introductions. These are all great moments, each in their own right, because they're humbling the ego I may have once had. My musings of "what do I want to be when I grow up?" are caught in one hand as I wander the paddocks with the horses.
All of this extensive preamble has led to this: what is trust?
To me, trust is inextricable from faith, but it's much more concrete. It’s the “one giant leap for mankind” coming from a place of belief that my spacesuit is going to survive the impact on the lunar surface. It’s faith with flying buttresses, a hedged bet against uncertainty. It requires suspending belief and falling into the soft mattress of cosmic order.
I have emerged from the last several weeks with a few more scrapes and bruises. I've had to navigate many different vectors of stress and strain. I've uprooted a life of fourteen years in Massachusetts for a life in a foreign land with no job and no current income. I've had to explain hard things to my now-adult kids about healthcare and the path forward.
Beyond all of that, though, I've had to rely on trust. I've had to bolster my faith in ways I've never quite understood with a word and concept I've perhaps taken for granted. Trust doesn't fall easy to hand or tongue. It's going to take some time to understand its cracks and crevices, to lean fully into its embrace. I'm not going to be without doubts; after all, I'm only human. But I'm going to trust the process, believe in the foundations of this thing called "trust," and pray that on the other side of this valley I'm in, there's going to be something beyond imagination.
May it ever be so.
