An Infinity of Invisible Staircases

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

We rely on trust a lot in our world.

This epiphany, this realization that almost every interaction I have, every moment of every day, is based on some form of trust, occurred to me a few weeks ago. And it came to me not in a state of meditation, nor a moment of prayer, nor even the shower (where I must add many epiphanies of the sort happen). This insight came to me, of all times, when I was getting my eyebrows done, for far too much money, at a small salon on High Street Kensington.

Let me explain.

I was sitting there, in a salon in a foreign country, with a woman who I had just given the responsibility of fixing up my unmanageable eyebrows, when I realized I did not know the woman’s name. Here I was, reclining with my eyes closed in a plastic chair that squeaked whenever I made the slightest movement, letting a stranger dictate the fate of my eyebrows.

How easy it would be, I thought, for this woman to simply take off half an eyebrow without me even knowing.

I had seen no certification of this woman, I had not inquired about her prior experience at eyebrow threading; for all I knew, she could have no clue what she was doing.

But here I was, sitting in a creaky chair, paying an absurd amount of money to a woman who, if she was feeling extra rebellious that day, could easily remove half, if not all of one of my precious eyebrows.

I’ll inform you now that I luckily left that salon that day with both my eyebrows in tact. But leaving one-browed was a real possibly I hadn’t thought of before. Because I had always trusted that all those beauticians at all those salons I’ve frequented just simply wouldn’t do such a thing.

This may seem like an absurd way to introduce this idea but the fact of the matter is:

we rely on trust a lot in our world.

Every time you step into a cab, you trust that driver to bring you safely to your destination.

Every time you go to a restaurant, you have faith that the food they serve you won’t make you sick.

And things do go wrong in our world: there are car accidents and there is food poisoning and there are inevitably people that will let you down.

But the point is, we trust so willingly so unknowingly, every second of every day. We take steps towards infinite amounts of invisible staircases from the moment we wake up trusting that our crappy insta-coffee will have the caffeine we need to wake up, to the moment we go to bed at night worrying about everything we have to do the next day, with faith that our roof that someone built years ago will still be there the next morning.

How truly blessed we are to be able to have faith in such simple things such as these. So many people cannot say the same.

Trust is such a beautiful thing. There’s something very human about it. There’s also something very optimistic about it.

So you can talk all you want about how this world is going downhill and hey, its definitely not perfect and we have a lot of work to do, but trust is believing in the inner good of people and at our cores, embedded in our very human nature, I believe we do have trust.

So today, make an effort to notice those little moments of hidden trust.

And don’t be afraid to keep moving towards those invisible staircases.