If you’ve been reading here for any length of time, you know that each month is devoted to tending trust around a different theme. My thinking has been to create a useful and accessible catalogue of “trust food” on a wide array of topics – topics I personally have interest in growing trust around and that feel timely and important to our world today.

What I never anticipated was the trust that I would grow because of the way these themes have unfolded. I used a lot of logic-mind in thinking through their order (connecting them with seasons, for example), and have each month sketched out rough lists of topics I want to cover and people I’d like to interview.

But as I live my life, and even as I sit before this screen to write new posts, I find my rough lists changing often, and posts I’ve been adamant about writing resisting being written at all. I’ve felt inspiration hit at odd times, and often in the slow dawning that’s followed intense bouts of fear and frustration that have had nothing to do with this site at all.

And of course those bouts have been consistently, precisely related to the topic I’m writing about that month.

It’s been almost creepy. But in a wonder-full way.

So my rough list for this month didn’t have the post on timeliness on it, nor the one about everything belonging. Both ideas came as I sat to write other things and paused, at the start, to listen.

But here I sit tonight with both before me, recognizing them as the container, or context, in which I think every last thing about help can be explored.

There is a buzz that comes with fear, a kind of static, that makes it difficult to access our full range of wisdom. This is quite literal, actually – a physiological trigger that keeps our neurological activity centered in our lizard brains – that part of us responsible for survival by means of fight-or-flight alone – rather than flowing to the parts of our brains responsible for much more nuanced, complex problem-solving.

If we consider the challenges of our time, and the challenges of our own households and souls – from global warming to chronic depression to war to rebellious teens to disease epidemics to violent gang activity to cancer to corruption in high places – all of it, every last challenge, can trigger the static that keeps our best efforts at help and at being helped well within the bounds – the constrictions – of our lizard brains.

Holding the conversation about help inside a paradigm of trust, on the other hand – inside a container of patience with process, humility about timeliness, and the expectation that goodness can flow from every last thing: this looks like anti-static to me. It looks like access to a whole different way of approaching the tough work ahead of us all.

Hearts can engage minds in this context.

Creativity and innovation can be unleashed.

Self-sabotage can relax into receptivity.

The desperation that leads to burn-out can lose steam.

I could go on and on as I imagine and play out help in situations where fear no longer dictates (and subverts!) action.

To bring this heady talk to the grist and grind of our everyday lives, consider these two questions:

1. What is one area in your life where you want to give or receive help?
2. How might your experience of that giving or receiving change if you weren’t afraid of any possible outcome?

I think these questions can be helpfully – transformingly – applied personally, as well as to bigger sociological/environmental/political challenges facing our world today.