Thinking the best of someone takes work, it takes trust. Something that we are programmed by evolution to do. To quote Malcolm Gladwell, we are trusting machines. Travel will teach you to, in fact, trust strangers and to recognize more often than not our fate is not in our own hands. Look around, our civilization is based upon the ability, our being trusting machines. Our economic system is based upon trust. Political norms are base upon trust. A civil society is based upon trust. It seems that we should never lock our doors. But we do.

And why is that, why do we lock our doors? The rhetorical question is easily answered by pointing out that there are people we cannot trust. People steal things. People lie. And so we lock our doors. We install camera doorbells and alarm systems in our houses. We come to call this normal, but it is not. We make it normal. Our trust machine is put into the background and we spend our lives looking over our shoulders.

People we love, our family, tells us that they support us, and yet…there is that sentence. Our families seem like loving and sympathetic people, but then why did they… We want to trust. We need to trust. We must trust others. But we must also adhere to truth. We must protect it and stand up for it. We must also realize that to trust we must lower our defenses and make ourselves vulnerable.

Both trust and truth are uncomfortable. But they are worth it. They are necessary, and they take courage to call a liar a liar, and a thief a thief. We must take it upon ourselves to do the work of being disliked at times, by someone all of the time. To trust we must be truthful and we must realize that others are not. To trust we must realize that we sometimes lie, and that others are truthful. It is not a game, but a philosophy of life. It is necessary for us to be happy and content. It is necessary for our survival.