Learning to have faith

  Faith is one of those prickly topics. It is inextricably tied up with belief and by association with religion and spirituality.
   It is a word used with scorn by skeptics and as a shield for those who lack the necessary evidence to have certainty in their views.
   Never-the-less it is absolutely necessary to have this quality in ourselves and those we trust. Life is not a science experiment that can be measured, repeated and subject to peer review. There are far too many permutations in our daily lives that we can have absolute certainty in every action we do. We must take action every day, that much is a certainty. Even not acting has consequences that cannot be measured before time.
    Faith is trusting in something even though there is not enough evidence to make it a certainty. Its opposite, doubt, is mistrusting because we lack the necessary evidence to make it a certainty. You can see they are exactly the same action but with either a negative or positive mindset attached.
    Applying doubt or faith to an external source such as a human being or a belief system is a luxury that we have the option of not choosing. But this doesn't hold true for ourselves. We must all make choices in this imperfect system without the benefit of absolute certainty. Thus we are given the choice to have faith or doubt in ourselves that we will make the best choices for our lives.
    Doubting oneself is a terrible burden, for with it carries guilt for every action that was not completed perfectly. For myself I have found that doubt has been at the root of many of my own personal recriminations. That I listened to the whispered voice of personal doubt, which makes feeling guilty so much easier. If I already doubt my choices to begin with, then guilt is so much easier to overlay.
      Trusting oneself is what lays beneath this. Without trust in oneself, it is easy to doubt...then from there to accept guilt for our choices. Fostering the goodness within us, we learn to trust and from there to have faith in ourselves and our choices even in the face of having no certainties.
      There are times when I have felt a certainty in my choices and then trusting myself becomes easier, times when I have felt totally attuned or a faultless sense of conviction in my actions. But these times are intermittent at best and you cannot live your life only from these moments. Doubts will assail us all, but only by having a faith in ourselves can we banish these imps back to the shadows.
       Recently I have had reason to doubt myself and it has caused a cascade of doubt to run through my self and to cause cracks in the walls of my convictions. It was as simple as missing a call. Working part time at the healing centre means I am on call if someone should show up and need a treatment. I missed the call by 10 minutes because I chose to take a walk and return long after it would be possible to do anything about it. It is one of those silly situations you see in movies but minimized to almost triviality, where a character doubts themselves for some consequence they feel they could have prevented by making an earlier choice differently. I know that there is no way I could have known to stay in, yet still the doubt lingers. Unlike other situations there is no-one but myself making me feel guilty.
       This guilt is made possible by my doubts. I don't doubt the bigger decisions in my life, the ones backed by righteousness, conviction or insight. I trust and have faith in my decisions on a larger scale. I know I am a good person and don't doubt I will make the right choice. It is the little everyday choices, the ones that have little or nothing resting upon them where doubt lives.
     Another incident occurred recently during my snow shovelling job. It was my first day and there was a pretty heavy snowfall I had to clear. I was working with new colleagues and it was laborious and physically demanding work. At one point I ended up working with the maintenance supervisor to clear a pathway. He is not part of my work detail, but the building's head maintenance guy so I was unsure of my hierarchical position in regards to him. He asked me to clear a certain pathway and then came back later I get the feeling to "check-up" on me. I was clearing a section of pathway that had tiny rivulets running through it and he told me that I should shovel it with the rivulets, rather than across them. I had found it made no discernible difference, yet he continued throughout the day to make tiny observations about our equipment, how much we had cleared and the time taken. My instinctive reaction was that the guy is behaving like a jackass, but my own doubts stopped me from putting a stop to the comments.
       These situations have a gravity of their own and after a multitude of minor hesitations on my part it all adds up to a major hesitation. The sense of independence, personal strength and integrity comes tumbling back down again. Realizing that a battle can be lost not through a major defeat but through steady attrition of faith in oneself makes it all the more important to stop the trickling losses.
       So the question remains. How does one learn to have faith in oneself if you are prone to self-doubt? The answer lies in trust. Trusting that you will make the right choices, even if they do not occur reflexively at first. This unconsciously doing the right thing does not immediately occur as soon as you understand it. For most of us it requires time and patience, it requires making mistakes, trusting the wrong people and being taken advantage of at first. Not everyone has a hyperactive defense system and for me coming from the position of giving people the benefit of the doubt too much...of caring and not wanting to hurt unnecessarily, it means that a mistake is the cost of learning. Over time I will get better at it, I will see the danger in the grass before stepping. I will trust my inner knowing, that gut instinct and give it credence and eventually be able to put it immediately into play.