Wednesday, October 17, 2012

The Glass Sculpture...

GUYS. I've been going to school this week. I'm so happy.

Yes, I said I went to school and it made me HAPPY. You don't understand what sitting at home alone for a whole week does to your mind. My family's awesome but I mean... come on... I was quarantined for like 168 hours. Nobody else wanted to get sick, and I don't blame them.

My main source of company was my dog... and she farts... a lot. Thank God when one of my friends decided to grace me with their presence. I was going insane, and seeing someone that didn't live in my house brightened my day like you wouldn't believe.

I've been thinking about the topic of trust a lot lately. I've been thinking about whom I trust, whether or not I'm trustworthy, what makes trust, etc.

What I realized is just how valuable trust is.

You see, I view trust as a glass sculpture. It's incredibly complex. At the same time it's beautiful. Creating a beautiful glass sculpture takes a lot of hard work and time (at least I'd guess it was... I haven't had an art class since sixth grade). Glass, however, is fragile. It's breakable. It doesn't matter how long you spent on making that glass sculpture. One mistake and it's gone.

Broken.

Shattered beyond recognition. Maybe not even by any fault of your own.

I've built up my glass sculptures before to the point where I thought they were almost finished. They were almost perfect.

And then they came crashing down around me. Uh oh.

What happens then? Do you fix it? Do you think "oh well" and move on?

In my life I don't have a lot of fully formed glass sculptures. I can only think of two right off the top of my head. I like to think that this means I'm careful with whom I trust. Trust isn't something that I just willingly hand out to people. That piece of art takes time to be turned into a masterpiece (my "sculpture making" record is like six months... but who's counting?).

I visualize my personal sculptures of trust as being organized in a gallery of sorts. Most of them aren't finished. The one-on-one trust that I form with the people that I've met isn't something that builds overnight.

Completely trusting someone is hard. Former English politician (and I mean very former... the dude died in like 1748 or something) Isaac Watts said that "Learning to trust is one of life's most difficult tasks."

I couldn't agree more. To give someone 100% of your trust is crazy scary... or at least it is for me. It means keeping no secrets. Telling them absolutely no lies. It means letting them get to know you to the point where they can read you like a book.

That's a  pet peeve of mine, now that I think about it. It bugs me when people just assume they know someone. Personally I don't care who claims to be able to read me. Chances are you can't. You don't know everything there is to know about me. I can still lie to you. Chances are I don't trust you entirely yet. That's not a bad thing. It just means you have to be patient. Patience is a virtue... or so I've been told.

Trust is delicate. As delicate as the most pristine glass. I take a lot of pride in the glass sculptures I've completed. I take more pride in the one or two that I've managed to hold on to.

I didn't build them alone, after all. 

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