Assurances

An attempt to understand promises, and the role they play in our individual and collective evolution.

Ton

9/23/20233 min read

I have observed, growing up and growing old, that when it comes to making promises or providing assurances and holding true to them, there are generally 4 kinds of people:

  1. Exploitative - Those who can afford to keep their promises, but willfully do not.

  2. Irresponsible - Those who make promises they cannot afford to keep.

  3. Disconnected - Those who do not care to make promises and expect none from others to be kept.

  4. Prudent - Those who make only promises based on their ability to keep them.

Human nature will almost always lead us to quickly try and label ourselves or others with any of the above. But human complexity will almost always ensure that any attempt to do so would become a rather fruitless endeavor. Even if we do not end up acknowledging them, the 2 inevitable conclusions that we would arrive at are:

  1. None of us are purely any of these types of people. Or more accurately, none of us are brought into this world readily labeled as any of them.

  2. All of us have in our nature to become any or all of these types of people.

I was brought up in a home environment and ultimately in a subculture where a premium had been placed on one's ability to "read" people.  This ability, typically worn as a badge of honor, supposedly helps provide the simplest answers to the question: "Who do I trust?".   Five-point-two decades later, I still cannot claim this ability, assuming mine is keen enough, to be adequate in providing such answers. 

Over these last 9 weeks, I found myself interfacing within at least 2 scenarios where I needed to provide assurances - One personal in nature, the other, professional.  In both cases, I have had to decide whether or not to provide "leap of faith" assurances where definitely none could be supplied to me in return.   In both cases, I have had to consider placing my bets on the inherent nature of people to think beyond themselves, to be selfless.  The difference between these 2 scenarios lies in what has time and again proven to be a necessary additional step in helping me decide whether to "invest" in people - which is, to get the best possible read of situations, in relation to what I see in the people immersed in them.  

I have found over the years that reading people alone is never going to be enough to help identify the options available to me.   I have found that it is equally important for me to be able to understand enough about the situations people find themselves in, before I could be convinced that the options in front of me are the best ones I could choose from.   I believe this to be applicable in all personal and professional scenarios.   

But neither a good read of people, nor a good read of situations where people interact with each other, or both, are going to be enough, especially when people still need to decide whether or not to accept that not all people and situations have assurances or guarantees built into them.  Life just doesn't come with absolute guarantees.  And none of us can ever know for sure about anything that transcends our mortally limited control.   The only real information we can possibly secure in advance is where we might miscalculate, what or who might burn us as a result, and how we might possibly pick ourselves up. 

A lot of the bets I had placed and continue to place in people, had been and have often been inadvertently weakened by suggestions that I could very well afford to make such investments. Even those whom I had bet on point to my complexion, my educational background and even my language proficiency in clumsy but somewhat amusing attempts to rationalize why I could afford to bet on them, as if to suggest that I have never lost, and that I have never been let down or that I have never been angry or that I have always had it good.  In recent years, I have had to learn to stop trying to dispel these misconceptions, as any effort to do so only succeeds in taking away the focus from what truly matters and in diminishing the power of what urgently needs to happen. 

The challenge with being trusted and in trusting others has a lot to do with the oft-spoken "Promises are made to be broken.", which is by no means a prescription for life, as much as it is one of life's most painful truths. Ultimately, the equation is both vicious, and circular - Disappointment feeds pain. Pain feeds fear. Fear feeds anger. Anger feeds more disappointment. The rebirth of Original Pilipino Music, or OPM, over these recent years, has thankfully produced this song which clues us in on what we all need to at least accept, in order to slow this vicious cycle down just long enough to show every single one of us the way forward.

It is my belief that the way forward, after disappointment and after we admit to the part that we ourselves played in it, is to rise above our pain and our mistakes, and to muster the courage to continue betting on ourselves, especially when others are clearly willing to help us do the same.  

(Credits to the artists Ben&Ben and Munimuni for their beautiful music and unwavering creativity. )