When you lose trust, you lose life

"The chief lesson I have learned in a long life is that the only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust."
- Henry L. Stimson

Everyone finds it discouraging when someone they trusted betrays that trust. Many stop trusting anyone in response.

Distrust is infectious. A person who commits a grievous error in betraying the trust of a friend may lose that trust and the friend. In turn, he may not trust others in his life. The cycle spirals until no one trusts anyone.

When we don't trust anyone, we can't express sympathy for others and we lose interest in helping others in need. Humans, a social species by nature, survived for so long by helping each other in times of need.

When we lose that characteristic, we lose the common thread that helped us become the dominant species on Earth we are today. In short, by not trusting others, we may bring about the eventual extinction of the human race.

Trusting another person is a gamble, one that does not pay off every time. Yet even if one such gamble in four pays off, it helps us to make friends. Friends are what sustain us through hard times.

Some time soon you will be given the chance to trust someone or to refuse to trust them. Forget about what you have to lose if your trust is misplaced, think about what you have to lose if you don't trust anyone.

Those who can't trust anyone lose the foundation that grounds them to place and to family, to who they are.

Bill Allin
'Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems,' striving to teach everyone the importance of trust, to themselves and to the world.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/cgi/index.pl