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The more you look, listen, and act, the more you can feel what people are feeling, want, and believe.

Listen. Watch. Feel. We can’t see some things, but we can feel their effects.

You can learn a lot by watching how we treat each other.

You can learn a lot by seeing how we distrust one another.

You can learn a lot by noticing how hard it is for us to work together.

The things we can’t see, we keep trying to make each other see.

The things we can’t hear, we keep trying to make each other hear. And the things we can’t feel, we keep trying to make each other feel.

Negative feelings are so powerful, and they have a way of spreading out from the people who feel them to everyone else.

How do we reconcile this? Well, some of us say: I’m not responsible for everyone else’s suffering. But if you think about it, that’s just a statement of resignation, and it’s saying, “I have accepted my powerlessness to stop suffering.”

Some of us say: I don’t have to worry about everyone else. That’s true. But is it a good thing to be so isolated from our fellow human beings? Is it a good thing for us to live in a society where most people feel that way?

There’s another cost as well: the time and energy we spend on distrusting each other could be spent doing almost anything else instead, especially since all those elaborate rituals for pretending are mostly just that: pretending. They usually only work some of the time; sometimes not at all.”

We are individualists. We are taught to believe that our thoughts and feelings are more important than other people’s thoughts and feelings. It’s the theme of every TV show. And it is not surprising that it shows up in our politics, in which people with opposing views are enemies who deserve no respect.

But there is another way of thinking about human beings. We are social creatures. Our ideas and feelings arise out of our relationships with other people, which means that if you want to understand them, you need to understand the connections.

This second way of thinking doesn’t just change how we see others; it changes how we see ourselves. If you understand how your feelings toward others arose out of your relationships with them, then they don’t seem like defenses against something else so much as expressions of what you feel toward others right now.

In a group, you have to spend a lot of time watching what other people are doing. But if you do this watching as a full-time job, it affects your behavior and understanding. In a group, the way you watch influences the way you act.

Our instinctive distrust makes us see our fellow humans as adversaries. This feeling makes us testy and unhappy; we let it out in little ways that make other people testy and unhappy. It poisons our days and breaks down our relationships. And because we’re all infected with it, we end up reinforcing each other’s worst tendencies. We make one another worse off than we would be otherwise.

The instinctive distrust is not inevitable; it is a habit we can learn to break. The first step is to understand how it works and notice when you feel it. The second step is to make yourself do something else instead:

Some chains must be broken.

#inspirational #trust #trustnoone #trustworthy #trustworthypeople