Trust, like our health is a fragile gift

This week's Independent news & Media Irish regional newspapers' column

Michael Commane

There’s the often trotted out cliché that our health is our wealth. We all say it from time to time but I often wonder do we ever really appreciate what it means to have good health.

Fortunately, I’m relatively fit. I’m walking in the hills, swimming in the sea and cycling a bicycle. Of course a lot of it has to do with our good luck but I also get down on my bended knee to thank my parents for the good start they gave me in life.

But it really is like walking on a tight rope. Anything can happen at any time. It often occurs to me out walking in the hills how easy it would be to trip and break an ankle. 

During the Christmas season a 17-year old boy tripped and fell into the sea in West Kerry and lost his life. The unspeakable pain that must be for his family. An accident can happen at the blink of an eye. 

How many times have I listened to the stories of people recalling the first tell-tale signs of cancer, and then how it slowly but surely changes their lives dramatically. I am forever asking the question what at all is life about.

When our bodies are up and running and at full throttle we can easily think that we are indestructible. And indeed we act accordingly. It’s easy to understand how young healthy people have no conception of what it means not to be able to ‘float like a butterfly and sting like a bee,’ quoting those great words from Muhammad Ali.

It’s such a thin divide between being healthy and well and unhealthy and infirm. It’s as close as one gets to the toss of a coin.

It’s a similar story with trust.

Has it ever dawned on you how we take the notion of trust for granted? Only last week a young mother told me when she goes running she sometimes brings her two young children with her and leaves them at one end of the park, assuring them that she is close by. 

She was explaining to me how her children have absolute trust in her and know exactly that what she is saying is true. They take her word as certain.

And again, we have another cliché for that. We say my word is my bond. It’s a powerful expression. But what happens when it is broken?

Most times, in normal healthy circumstances we take trust as a given, it’s as certain as the air we breathe.

What do we do when we no longer trust a close friend. Indeed, what happens when we lose trust in another person, our boss, a community, an organisation, the place where we work?

 

Certainly, anonymity destroys trust and much of social media is no friend of trust.

Everything about our lives is so fragile. It all seems to hang by a thread. And what’s so strange about it all, we seldom if ever see it in such terms.

When we’re healthy we take it for granted and we take it as a given to trust people. 

But when we have serious health issues it requires great skills to bring us back to health. And so too with trust, when we lose it, it requires great skills to restore it.