ON TRUST

George Carlin once told a joke that went something like this: "Whenever you brake your car, your life is in your foot's hands." Like most Carlin jokes, he used language and its quirks and cliches to make us think. Technically, of course, he was right. When braking your car, you put all of your trust in your foot, and the brake pedal, linkage, brake lines, brake fluid, brake pads, brake discs and other parts of the car's braking system.
You are trusting a thing with your life.
I get that. Really I do. I trust my truck with my life every day. I ride a bicycle and I trust in it, my helmet and my instincts and experience to make sure I return in one piece. And I have been let down. A flat tire recently ended a ride just minutes after it started. And my truck recently failed to start, resulting in a big inconvenience and an expensive repair and tow bill. And I just had to take my bike into the shop because, well, some components had worn out and no longer were working properly. No longer could I trust them.
So why is it so much easier to trust things than it is to trust people? Do people let us down so much more than things do? Or is it just, like my bike, easier to understand and explain why a thing fails us but not people?
Not that I have not trusted people in the past. But when they let me down, when they betray that trust, I vow to never let that happen again. When I asked a girl out on a date and she literally sneered at me in disgust at the very idea of me having the nerve to even broach the subject, don't think I ever did that again. At least not with her. And when I told some personal worries or concerns to a co-worker only to find she'd let them be known to nearly everyone else, I didn't do that again either. I have grown to live by the Irish saying: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." And I was not about to get fooled again, to paraphrase The Who.
But I still trust my truck, now that the starter has been repaired. And I got back on my bike, after repairing the flat tire. And I will get on it again, once these new repairs have been made. I will trust it, along with my helmet and all of the rest, with my very life. And yet I find it so very difficult to trust another person not with my life even, but just a small portion of who I am, what I am like, what I think, what I know, what makes up me.
It is so easy to build walls against the forays of others, against the attempts by people we know -- not complete strangers, but possible friends, lovers even -- to get inside and get closer. Because at one time or another, we let down our defenses, lowered the drawbridge, opened the gates and let people in, and they trashed the place. We've since cleaned up their mess, but we're not going to do that again.
And if we don't, we'll be safe. Removed, reserved, distant, cold, aloof, mysterious, quiet, unfriendly, but safe.
But if we can bring ourselves to trust a person again, as we come to trust a repaired vehicle, a fixed faucet, a contrite computer, we may just find something we've been missing for all of our lives, something far more precious than anything we've been working so hard to protect.
We might just find love. And not just any love, but the love of a lifetime. The soulmate. The only person put on earth just for us, and us just for them.
But first, we have to trust. Again.