It’s blog day, the first weekend of the month and it’s spring. Even though it still feels like winter, there is comfort in seeing the daffodils bloom and the trees full of blossoms.
Trusting spring will occur, announced by plants doing the ‘right’ thing – is an emotionally stabilising phenomenon.
Following on from last months blog I’m still playing with ideas around trust. I’m thinking about trust as another oxytocin production indicator. How trust is assessed, if you like, is by our ability to be absolutely in the moment, not jumping ahead or sliding into the past. Appreciation of beauty in the moment, is one way of doing this. In effect when we do this, we are trusting ourselves to feel the warmth of love – this feeds our soul and potienally provides one of those moments of exhilaration that defines a spiritual encounter.
These moments are often found whilst we are participating in our personal rituals, or self-soothing practises, as David Schnarch would say.
When I think about this I start to ponder how completely interwoven trust and love are. Fear, I believe, is the destroyer of love and trust. As we become more fearful we seem to have a strange disconnect happening.
This is a work in progress, but somehow, despite fear putting doubt over our every day safety we seem to be able to trust strangers. Is this new or is it just a sort of rebranding?
Back to technology and it’s impact.
It feels weird that we can be so fearful that we can’t let our kids walk to school (they might get kidnapped/raped/bullied) or venture outside to enjoy a moment in the sun (might get skin cancer) and yet we can put our credit card details into the computer and send them off to who knows where; trusting that all will be well. Surprisingly, in the main it is. I find it such a wonder when something I’ve booked on the other side of the earth, works.
The question for me is how come we can trust in a way that is disconnected and yet struggle to trust our local community.
In the past, I had hypothesised that with the absence of formalised religion we lost the mechanism that regulated our ’emotional stabilising rituals’. Religion enhanced trust with the belief that ‘ god loves you and will take care of you’. Hence the resultant battles for who has the ‘right god’.
Now I’m wondering if in essence nothing has changed, we have just moved from the rituals of traditional religion to the rituals of the Internet – our new religion – whether it’s the great advisor Google, gaming or social media. The Internet is the ‘new god’ and many of our rituals are now built around it. So in a sense we have a continuous, not as I previously thought, discontinuous process.
If this rings true for people we could define our addiction to technology as just a new religious practise. No wonder we’re all hooked. I would love your comments.
P.S. I was interested to note when I was doing a spelling and grammar check for this piece ‘word’ wanted all the internet related terms in capitals but didn’t worry about god!
Hi Claire. It’s Zorica. Funny that you speak of this. As you know in my current line of work assisting families and youth we grapple with this modern world everyday. It’s scary. I worry about the quality of relationships in the future. I feel the presence of technology on my once upon a time ‘rested & focused’ mind, and question all the time, where to next? What will come of this world in a further 5-10 years. The increase in social media/technology and influence in my line of work alone since 2008 has provided with an abundance of challenges. I’m not sure we know what is yet to come. We are still in the wonder and awe of these countless connections on a daily basis. Instant gratification has increased the anxiety of once sitting on the moment of what will come out of this, to ‘please, answer now or this is urgent, or I am unloved because no one is responding’, all of which are illusions. Realities that don’t or need to exist. I have many moments of struggling myself with finishing one email as I have three other urgent matters to address at the same time. I have plastered a simple daily reminder one my whiteboard ‘Do one thing at a time, do it slowly & deliberately and do it completely’, it scares me that I have to remind my jumping mind of something so simple.
The recent local research I have undertaken is showing us that the modern world is impacting children in the middle years, excess worrying and restless sleep. All which are not great in the ‘use it or lose it’ pruning stages of brain development in the pre-adolescent phase. The questions I’m left with are how much goodness are we giving ourselves, how are we nurturing ourselves, and how do we find a way to strike a healthy balance in the modern world?
Thanks for sharing Claire. I always end up with more questions than answers but I’m sure I could just google a satisfying answer 🙂
Thanks Zorica, this is a great comment and the research you’re doing re childrens worry and restless sleep is very interesting.
If you feel inclinded you could post it in a comment at some point. Also like the way you’ve talked about the increasing difficulty of maintaining focus – it’s definitely a work in progress
I’ve never thought about the connection between trust and presence before, but what you say does make sense. And then, how utterly awful to think of the internet as our new religion! Ahhh! Of course its wonderful for many things when used well, but in my view religion or spirituality is outside the realm of knowledge and the kind of superficial connectivity the web provides. There are pointers there for sure, but this rich and rewarding place is best reached through deepening ones relationship with self and other in raw form, through flesh and bone community etc. But what can successfully take religions place? Art? Music? Plain old love?
Incredible points. Sound arguments. Keep up the great effort.