Dear Rabbits,
Are you confident?
I often struggle with the idea of confidence, and I’m sure many of you do too. Even the answer to “what is confidence?” sometimes seems unclear. But confidence is so important to understand for anyone who wants to live simply and live well.
Without confidence, we’ll spend more energy preparing for contingencies than living. We’ll be nervous about pleasing and impressing other people. We’ll create “if only”s as excuses not to be happy just yet. We’ll worry and worry and our mind will go a mile in one hundred directions, but we won’t take a single step forward.
So to live simply, confidence is necessary.
I think part of the reason confidence seems so unattainable for so many is that we don’t have a proper understanding of confidence. So what is confidence?
Well I can easily tell you what it’s not. The confidence I’m talking about isn’t a high self image or ego or feelings of invincibility. You will always make mistakes, so if you rest your confidence in your abilities, intelligence, or awesomeness, eventually, that will be shaken. Your confidence might soar one day and plummet the next…and what kind of a confidence is that? Confidence is for relying on, so it had better be reliable!
The confidence I’m talking about is confidence of the “confidence in sunshine, confidence in rain” variety. True confidence is resting in the reassurance that everything is as it is, and that’s okay.
This is the confidence that will bring about a peaceful life with calm, attentive steps. A life without the rushing around, worrying about people’s opinions, nervous buying, and insecurities.
I see confidence as a sort of fundamental faith in the forces of life. Confidence is sort of a foundation and energy for our beliefs and desires. It is something that shapes and enables our lives. It gives us a foothold.
So how about resting our confidence in the stability of the universe, in the order of things? Trust that things are as they should be…not because there is a “should be” and things inevitably match up with that, but because there is a “way things are,” and that is how it should be!
If this sounds a little vague and you’re curious what this looks like more specifically, have no fear: we’ll be returning to the idea of confidence pretty regularly in the future. So stay tuned and thanks for reading!
Love,
~ Loy
