My mother spends her days contemplating love as a form of remembering. She remembers, therefore, she loves. She loves and trusts, therefore, she is. One day in the distant future, she too will join the ranks of our ancestors and hold me in her memory. My mother breathes in consolations of the preservation of her individual and cultural identity, knowing, always knowing that memory is far more than just an individual experience, but a communal undertaking.

To see ourselves, including our aspirations, reflected in the eyes of the other, including in the most unexpected and surprising of ways. There is a degree of whimsy to encounter, like a mating dance that may or may not result in the consummation, platonic or otherwise, of the relationship. This consummation is not only with the other but with oneself as both recognise themselves in each other while recognising the other in themselves. Failing this, our hearts are restless until they rest in the other, finding community wherever one may turn.

Still, internal and external conflict can be beautiful and create the conditions of possibility for mutual understanding to flourish, but only if the principle of trust as a socio-biological mandate that holds irrespective of individuals and communities’ subjective experience of their capacity to accept the Other is upheld. We are always already Other, and this is true regardless of our efforts to build and establish communities with impermeable boundaries. However, trust as the socio-biological organising and governing principle of the world and all relationships thereof, makes these boundaries porous and subverts any effort to erect rigid borders between us and others that undermine the equality of persons.

Trust as a socio-biologically mandated imperative is fundamentally hopeful as it is non-discriminatory. Nevertheless, safety, security, and stability are consistently conceptualised in oppositional, polarising terms, hence the prevailing understanding of trust in transactional and subjective terms. Accordingly, in the contemporary social imaginary we are hostage to the treacherous belief that the universalisation of trust and self-actualisation, including as members of discrete communities, are mutually exclusive. Here, there is no universal solidarity as partiality remains sovereign.

Still, trust does not require belief and that one have faith that disappointment will not knock on their door if they choose it. In fact, trust is not about choice at all. If it is socially and biologically mandated as we have supposed thus far, then it is a principle that we practice and enact and is not primarily an individual disposition that one wilfully cultivates.

This is the end of the beginning, a Ferris wheel dancing into flickering horizons unabashedly echoing the wonderment of yesteryear. Trust is a game, undelighted by bronze statues and the anamnesis of the present moment which lingers on the tongue like a marriage fallowing the land as sparrows and ravens, galahs and budgies, magpies and rainbow lorikeets disperse and diverge into the morning dew.

In the final analysis, Frankl can be understood to be saying that the attitude one takes to his suffering and circumstances can either exacerbate or alleviate his pain. This pain, a product of one’s inability to identify and enact the sources of meaning in his life at any given time, can be alleviated by recognising and acknowledging the responsibility we all have to life and living.

Writing fundamentally expresses a desire to be recognised—acknowledged. For one’s words to be tied to a name attached to a living and breathing identity. One that touches the lives of others and is touched in turn. One that has responsibilities and fails or succeeds in meeting them. One that is coloured by joy and sorrow and the individual’s efforts to negotiate the contours of these experiences.