STABILITY AND SECURITY

Trust is a strange bedfellow to intimacy. To be intimate one has to feel safe. It doesn’t matter how trustworthy a person might be if I am not trusting. 

My trust level will have been formed from a lifetime of experiences. In the most positive scenario I have built strong relationships upon ongoing instances of unconditional love and acceptance, finding others who were always there for me and who could overcome disagreements and conflicts through the course of compassion, forgiveness and ultimately letting go. Just as likely and at the other extreme I might have been through a series of betrayals, abandonments, and interpersonal hurt due to others not understanding or not caring, seeing me as inferior or undeserving of their undivided attention – I become a nuisance.

It is these lifelong dynamics that have a lasting effect on us, and our ability to trust. We might see the world as life affirming or as a dangerous place. Our histories form our perspectives on the continuum between abundance versus scarcity. 

Many of us believe that there will never be enough. The extreme of this group could be the hoarders, who grew up with nothing, and to whom everything is valuable and nothing should be discarded. At the other end of this continuum might be those who have always had everything given to them and thus expect everybody to work on their behalf and take everything for granted. Most of us fall between these two extremes as we modify our relationship to our own sense of security.

It is easy to feel that I have given my best years to the workplace and thus I deserve to be taken care of in my last quarter of a lifetime. The operative word here is “deserve” as this is a term that is so radically subjective. 

My sense of security depends on it even though my actual secure place in the world might be totally unconnected to my worldview or personal perspective. If I believe that I don’t deserve security, love, equanimity, respect, etc. then I will likely spark a self-fulfilling prophecy through which I will exist in a state of instability and resultant fear.

My own personal process on this has been a roller coaster reaching the heights of excitement followed by the gut-wrenching fear that precedes the fall and then the relief of having leveled out into a plateau of normalcy again. As is quite common, I have likened the choice to retire at this point as “a leap of faith.” 

I have long been only concerned with the fear and excitement of taking the leap. At this point I am spending more time considering the landing and the first steps beyond. This blog is a way of sorting all of that out in my mind, getting a sense of who is doing the leaping and the landing and ultimately the living.