"You have to trust in something"

Steve Jobs did the commencement address at Stanford this year. Doubtless you know who he is, and if you've ever watched any of his MacWorld addresses, you already know he's a helluva speaker. But this one was particularly special, and a truly amazing retelling of many of the events that shaped where he is now.

Click here for the whole address

There's one particular passage that really struck me.

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

This whole line of thinking - trust, faith, karma, etc. - has been on my mind a lot recently. In particular, someone asked me something along the lines of, "Why do you agree with parents forcing their kids to follow a religious belief that they don't believe in?" That struck home a bit, because I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian family, later became Catholic and am now Unitarian-Universalist. But honestly, I'm grateful for the upbringing I had. Because even though I never bought the whole ball of wax of my parents' religion, I learned a lot about personal faith. And to me, that faith is a very simple thing. I learned how to believe in something that I couldn't see or even explain, but just was, and that that belief and trust would somehow get me through anything that came my way. As I got older, I used that same sort of thing with other people. If you're someone whom I believe in, it's not something that you constantly have to prove or work for - I just do, and that very rarely changes. That's burned me more than a little, but it's fundamental to me, and not something I can really "fix". And while the simple faith is considered by some to not be properly thoughtful, more than naive and pretty foolish, it's also a great comfort.

And that's where another paragraph of Jobs' speech jumps out:

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

I can't say that my inner voice is very loud, or that my heart is very smart in its path. But maybe it all comes down to faith and trust after all.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Indeed.