On Trust

Yesterday, my student asked me how to best remember all the words she has to memorize. It's a fairly common question, and one she has asked before periodically. It's a little hard to answer. How do you remember things? Well, you just do it. But that's not a helpful reply.

I talked to her a little about learning modalities, visual, auditory and kinesthetic ways that people have of organizing their experience. People usually focus in one of these more strongly than the others, thinking in pictures, in sounds or in feelings. For the best, most resilient results, it's good to combine as many as possible. I told her to look at the word, the spelling, the shape of it and to equate it with the Japanese meaning. I told her to also visualize the meaning, the object or idea the word symbolizes and to connect them. I told her to repeat the word in her head, and aloud, and to write it on paper, and then to write it with her finger on her hand, and to put the word on some part of her body, so she would always have it on her.

I also explained how to break words into components, roots and affixes, to hold onto the meaning that way. But as I was saying all this, knowing that it was good advice, I realized it wasn't enough.

"You have to trust yourself. You have to trust that you have the ability to remember, that you can do it, even if it takes many tries." I realized that this was key. It surprised her, because I don't think anyone had ever shared such an idea with her before, but she agreed that it was important.

But even as we talked about it, I realized that it wasn't enough either. It's not enough to say you trust yourself if you remain untrustworthy. Trust is something that you earn, isn't that what we say? It's a commodity, something we pay out to people, a line of credit.

People complain that schools are so concerned with fostering self-esteem in their students, that they pile praise on everyone for everything, whether it's warranted or not. It's a trust that has not been earned, at least not by the standards of the world outside of school. This is somewhat beside my point.

I told her to trust herself, and then to earn that trust by doing the work that needed to be done. Perhaps that is so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but it feels profound to me. "I trust myself," is something I have told myself many times, reassuringly in times of trial, but in that moment I realized that I often don't live up to my own ideals, and that I often don't really try to. Is that because I don't trust myself, or because I haven't earned my own trust? Are they even separable? It is not so simple an issue. I trust myself with certain things, and not at all with others, like alcohol. Other things I go back and forth on. It's a deep and interesting question that I shall be pursuing for a while.

The one thing I don't think is really useful is the capitalist metaphor of trust as commodity. I'm trying to think of another one that may be more comfortable. Rather than something bought and sold, or earned and squandered, perhaps it is more a bond, or a bridge that is built through a relationship, and then maintained or sabotaged, or left to decay.

We say that one, too: build trust. Building and earning imply entirely different relationships. Perhaps it is an ore that is mined, shaped and polished with care, or tarnished through misuse. Forge trust: I think we use that one, too.

Trust is a dance, trust is a fine meal, trust is a wave to a daring surfer. Or something like that.