It Goes from Dogs to Plates. (It Makes Sense, I Swear.)

 ***Hey there, it's just me. If you're reading this, I'd love to hear from you. You can find me on Twitter @isignalforcows Let me know what you think! Tell me what you'd like to see here in the future! I appreciate you taking the time to read my ramblings, so let me know how I can keep this fresh and interesting for you. :)***
 

The thought path on this one is a little circuitous — just bear with me.

The other week I had occasion to dig through my old photo files and, in doing so, found a bunch of pictures of me with other people’s dogs. At this point, sadly, all of the dogs in the photos have moved on from this life, and they are all very much missed by their humans and their extended human family. Naturally, I got a little verklempt over the whole thing. These were records of furry little souls I had spent time with, and it’s all I have left of them. Photos and lovely, slobbery, wiggly, tail-waggy memories.

All of those dogs were special to me, and to their families, but there’s always one, isn’t there? One that’s beyond special. One that full-body-wiggles its way into your heart, turns around three times, and settles in forever.

For me, it was Monty.

Monty was an American Pit Bull Terrier (possibly a mix, but that’s a secret known only to his mother and father). He was mostly black with a white patch on his chest and little white French manicure tips on three of his paws. He was a rescue. He was missing half his teeth, had a scar down one side which seemed to be linked to his only-noticeable-if-you-were-looking-for-it limp, and he was afraid of everything. If it made noise, he didn’t want anything to do with it. If it was unfamiliar, he hid behind what was. If it was large and male and human? Oh, that was the biggie. Large, male, and human sent him under the nearest piece of furniture or the deck or whatever was on hand to be used for hiding.

Long story short, the poor guy had trust issues.

This is going somewhere, I swear. My little foray into those photos got me thinking about Monty, which got me thinking about the origin of trust.

We’re born with nothing. We’re helpless and squalling and utterly dependent upon those around us to attend to our needs.

“But how would an infant have the capacity to trust or not? They haven’t developed that level of thought yet.”

Well, in a way, they have. They trust that if they make enough fuss, something will be done. They’re hard-wired for that.

“But is that really trust, or is that just screaming?”

Inclined as I am to classify it as ‘just screaming’, it’s screaming with a purpose (usually), and it’s a cry for anyone within earshot. Eventually — and I’m sure it’s different for everyone — preferences for caregivers manifest, presumably based upon routine and familiarity, but there’s a level of trust involved in those things, too.

“I trust these two big people because they take care of me. I don’t trust that old bag who shows up on Tuesdays because she doesn’t do things the same way as my normal big people.”

...I’m not sure if the concept of Tuesday and having the presence of mind to classify someone as an ‘old bag’ are too far advanced for a fictional infant’s inner monologue.

If one doesn’t first trust, how can one come to distrust? This would imply the existence of inherent trust. I mean, if we were all born cynical and paranoid there would be far fewer hours of classroom instruction devoted to lessons involving things like: “John can trust Mrs. Peterson because she lives next door and knows John and his mommy and daddy. John can’t trust the man in the windowless white van outside the school yard because he has never met him before.”

So are we born with an inherent level of trust, and as we grow, we refine it through experience? Perhaps along the lines of ‘We trusted Uncle Joe to toss us in the air and catch us, until one day he missed, and now we won’t play that game with him anymore, because ow’?

Or do we learn to trust only after we’ve been treated in a fashion that leads us to distrust the person or situation that was unpleasant? But again, this implies an inherent level of trust to begin with, and we’re back where we started.

Chicken? Egg?

Never mind where it comes from or how we develop it, I suppose the heart of the matter is that trust is both an intensely fragile thing, and can have the strength of an iron girder. It’s all in how you nurture it.

If we go back to Mr. Monty for a minute, he was conditioned, through unconscionable abuse, to distrust just about everything. That distrust stayed with him even after he was safely in a home with people who cared for him. I’m still, frankly, amazed at the fact that he trusted me the way he did. It took him a solid hour, but once he decided I was safe, I was safe forever. 

Like, “Hi, I’m a dog and I’m going to sleep rightnexttoyou and snore in your ear and hide behind you when the doorbell rings kthx” safe.

How? Why? What made him come to that decision? Would it have changed after the fact if I had started kicking him? (I would NEVER, obviously, but it’s something to think about.) And this is the thought process of a dog, which, according to everything we know at this point in time, isn’t nearly as complex as that of a human being.

So let’s add that layer of complexity. Human beings exist with a whole lot of gray area. We trust different people to different extents. I might trust a co-worker about as far as I could throw them, but I trust my best friend with my deepest, darkest everything. I might trust Emily to keep a secret, but not Jane because we all know she’s got the biggest damn mouth there ever was and ever will be, amen. These are things we learn as we go along. Whether we attack them from a place of initial trust or initial distrust is a product of so many factors in our lives. If we’ve existed in an environment conducive to trust, we have no trouble placing trust in others — ‘innocent until proven guilty’, if you like — and we’re surprised when someone dishonors that trust. On the other hand, if we’ve come from a place of keeping everything at arms length because experience has taught us that very little is to be trusted at the outset, we expect to have others betray us at every possible opportunity.

Though these are equally valid methods for assessing our acquaintances, the latter comes with some extra baggage that speaks to a destructive sort of nurture. There’s a meme that makes the rounds on the internet every so often. It goes something like, “Take a plate. Smash it on the floor. Now say you’re sorry”, the point being that once you’ve fucked up, the person on the receiving end is irrevocably damaged, and no amount of ‘I’m sorry’ is going to return them to their original, unbroken-plate state. Once fractured, it becomes more difficult to believe that the next person isn’t going to eventually smash you to bits, too.

Why do humans have such a difficult time just being basically decent to each other? I doubt we’ll ever know.

Moral: Don’t be the plate-smasher.

And I hope beyond hope that you’re not the plate.