Belief in and of itself is neither good or bad, it’s what we attach to it that determines its result.
Do we believe in the circumstance? Do we believe in the outcome of it? Do we believe in the people involved… ourselves? Perhaps we believe in our own belief?
What does that mean? To believe in our own belief.
Some of us speak of belief or faith in this way. It’s not really attached to anything, we might just say something like: “I have faith!” But when we really think about it… how do we really have faith. How do we believe?
If you’ve ever looked forward to something happening that was canceled at the last minute, you probably found quite suddenly that you cannot have faith events or even a schedule.
Or maybe a loved one told you that they’d always be there for you (or at least led you to believe it), but turned out that when the moment didn’t quite suit them… they were gone. So truly, how much of our belief can we lay on people, especially when they don’t always follow through?
And what about ourselves? Surely if we’re breathing air in our lungs and are being completely honest, we can say we haven’t completely followed through at times either. We can’t even commit to our own goals for ourselves at times. So much for believing in ourselves!
When We Believe, What We Believe
So then there’s believing in our own belief. As if it wasn’t enough to get the hard lesson of our fallibility of believing in ourselves, now we have something else to contend with… Something so subtle that it really is quite innocent in appearance. In fact, sometimes it has no appearance at all. Belief.
Have you ever witnessed someone capture a room simply by the amount of confidence they carry? What are they so confident about we wonder… where does it come from? But then something strange happens if we pay close enough attention to their lives for a while. Life, for this person becomes solely about these moments of showing confidence. “How much confidence can I show today to get by?” they ask themselves.
Well, the same holds true for belief. How much belief can I “show” just to get by. Even without anything to support it. Here today, gone tomorrow like the wind.
When we believe only for the sake of our own belief, rather than the truth… That IS the real deception.
“You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” -Abraham Lincoln
