How to trust yourself (you don't even know yourself)

 It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon and I'd worked all weekend. So I got up from my computer and went for a long walk. I was looking for stress management through fresh air and exercise. And I was looking for something more.

One important, invisible problem with knowing we have an impact is that we are not really sure who "we" are. We call the part of our mind that makes most of our choice the "unconscious." This is not because it lacks consciousness (it's always wide awake) but because we are not conscious of it within us. How can we trust ourselves when we can't even know ourselves? It's the fundamental insecurity of life as a human.

And the answer, is that we cannot see or know our unconscious selves, but we can observe their connection to the world around us. You can notice how the things around yous resonate with the things in you. You can develop awareness of how you show up in your relationships with people and with the problems you like to solve and with the problems you resist solving. You can observe your choices as if they were made by someone else (because in a way, many of them are).

You can own those choices not because you can see all the working pieces (you can't) but because you know yourself to be part of what makes choice possible and what makes choice matter. You can choose to participate with the unconscious patterns that drive behaviour or you can choose to change them. When you change them, you don't just change you. You change all those thousand invisible ties that connect you to other people and to the world around you.

As the poet, Christina Rossetti, observed of the wind:

Who has seen the wind? 

Neither you nor I. 
But when the trees bow down their heads, 
The wind is passing by. 

The wind has often been a metaphor for spirit, the mysterious self outside conscious awareness that changes what we do and what we mean. We are not the first generation to know that we are more than we think. And there is no easy answer to how you live with the impact of the choices you make only half knowing why you are making them.

Trusting yourself is like trusting anyone else. It's not absolute: it changes as you make choices and notice the results. Over time, you earn the benefit of the doubt because you experience enough moments when your conscious mind aligns with both your unconscious self and your impact on the world. It doesn't mean you'll never disagree again: it means you can make choices knowing the relationship will survive them.