Trust Like the Second Time

When I was in college, I had a work study at the business school's computer lab. I worked all the time, including Saturday mornings. On Saturday mornings, it was my job to open the lab.

Sometimes, when I'd get to the business building, it would be locked. Instantly, I'd panic, frantically praying and stressing and trying to figure out what to do—I needed to be clocked in to get paid, and if I didn't open the lab, no one else could come in and use it.

After the panic would subside, I'd usually call campus security and have them come unlock the building. Total, it probably took about ten minutes. Nothing crazy. But in my mind, it was a huge day wrecker. It was a huge mountain that took all my strength to climb.

I found myself climbing a lot of those mountains during that time—bumps in the road that felt extremely overwhelming to me. But the more I faced these mountain-bumps, the more I realized things always worked out. My biggest fears never actually happened, and even if they did, I navigated them and survived.

One of my favorite movies is called About Time, starring Domhnall Gleeson and Rachel McAdams. The premise of the movie is that the main character, Tim, learns that all the men in his family, including himself, possess the strange gift to go back in time and change the outcome of life. The movie is about Tim learning how to use this gift, at first for major life moments and decisions, and later for smaller obstacles. Eventually (sorry, spoiler alert), he begins to go back in time once every day—only he wouldn't change a thing. The first time through, he'd live life with all its annoyances and worries and messes. The second time through, he'd simmer in each moment, relishing all of the beautiful details he missed because he was so worried--the smile of the cashier, the laugh of his kids. The movie ends with him not using the gift at all, after learning to live each day as though it were the second time through, trusting that everything would work out, since it always did.

I have found myself over the past years trying to live as though it's my second pass through life, too—trusting that each day will turn out just fine, trusting that everything works out and that I'll always be okay. I'm not always great at it—some days are more difficult than others—but it's a wonderful practice that has enriched my life greatly. It's taught me something about the principles of the universe, too: we create our own experience with our energy.

When we're afraid of our outcome, not trusting on a grand scale that everything will work out and that we will be—that we are—okay, we tend to operate from fear and bend over backward to establish control. Our control, in my experience, is always absolute garbage—it usually ends up making what we feared come true, creating a bunch of emotional collateral along the way, and it almost always hurts those around us. Sometimes it looks like tight itineraries,

sometimes a spotless house, sometimes an eating disorder. There are many ways that we as humans love to pretend we are in control.

But controlling things sucks. It's exhausting and it leaves no room for the Universe/God/whatever you want to call that Life Force to do its magic. It certainly leaves little room for appreciating the smile of the cashier and the laugh of children.

Author Laurence Galian wrote:

We fear what is uncontrollable. This "control" attitude results in an "order fetish." People become obsessed with mowing and grooming their lawns and obsessed with neatness. People living in contemporary society are split beings divided against themselves. Our Eurocentric society is wounded. Society does not want to feel pain. Therefore, society denies history, and hides its collective head in the sand. We must reintegrate what we have taken apart and love the thing we fear.

Observing my own little "order fetishes" is a helpful practice. These days, it usually takes the form of making my house clean and having tons of photo-worthy food when people come over, even close friends who don't care about those things. Always when it's happening, it makes my stomach feel clenched, makes me anxious. And always when it's happening, I can tell that the more I lean into the anxiety and fear, the more anxious and fearful I become. And always when it's happening, I can tell that if I just calmed down and stopped caring, I could lean into the flow of things and not care about how anything turned out, trusting it would all turn out just fine, if not wonderful.

When I find myself starting to get into worry-fear mode, there are a few things I find helpful:

1. Pause: Getting myself to step out of the stream of fear and just be for a moment, grounding myself in where I am in time and space.

2. Breathe: Taking deep breaths that fill my entire stomach, bringing me back to my body and my very essential self.

3. Take Inventory: Checking to see if anything I am doing out of fear is going to actually make my situation better (the answer is almost always no).

4. Go Forward Mindfully: Deciding where I want to operate from and imagining how that would feel, leaning into that feeling.

Something to note is that trusting everything will work out does not mean trusting it will all go as planned. It's trusting that my plan is kind of worthless, or is a helpful guideline at best, and that I don't need to know what the outcome will look like to know that I will be satisfied or to know that I am okay in the present moment.

Some people say that love is the opposite of fear, and I think that's true; but I think even more than that, the opposite of fear is trust.

Trusting doesn't mean saying prayers on repeat, worrying that the first time didn't take. It's setting your concerns into some imagined Universe net and then turning away, focusing your attention on the way the sun is coming through the window, or on the iridescence of bubbles that form as you wash dishes, or on the cashier's smile or a child's laughter. It's leaving the big stuff up to fate and paying your respects by appreciating the details of the world you inhabit.

If I'd known back in college that things would always work themselves out and that I was always okay, I probably wouldn't have panicked so much at a locked door. I wouldn't have had to go through a roller coaster of emotions before I picked up the phone and worked toward a solution. I might have even noticed some of the flowers blooming nearby. My calm, trusting energy might have interacted with the energy around me a bit better, easily flowing instead of stressing in friction.

Life is short, and it's also long—too long to spend worrying about (and indirectly sabotaging) its outcome, and ourselves. Operating from trust instead of fear keeps us connected to our Essential Self and to Nature, to our own spirit and that of the Universe. It might be tricky to begin, but that is the paradox of trust: you must trust in trust to begin. "The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them," as Hemingway put it.

May we all learn to trust a little more each day, both in ourselves and our outcomes. May we all live each day as though it's the second time through.