How trust emerges naturally from self-awareness—and eating well
How trust emerges naturally from self-awareness—and eating well
Wayfinding and social adventure in Sardinia
Today’s essay is part of a fourth series by six men writing here on Substack including myself, , , , , and . You may recall our past series on fatherhood, work, and recovery. This series, which marks a year that we’ve been writing together, is on trust.
You know that moment when sunshine shifts to grey—when everything’s been working so well, but then the gears start to grind ever-so-slightly, and you get a sense that maybe you missed a turn a ways back down the road? At least for me, carefree confidence can still shift all at once to grasping desperation, the buoyant trust that leads me to say “I can fly that plane,” evaporating in an instant, leaving me stranded in a fog of doubt and confusion. While these lost moments are rare for me now, they still occur, and it’s important for me to try to understand why.
Several weeks ago I flew to Sardinia on a mission to explore the mountain interior of this unique Mediterranean island. My goal was to do for myself what I often do for others with my guide service, and design a journey that combined some serious physical activity in an unfamiliar place of profound natural beauty with the challenge of a social adventure that would put me in new situations with new people in a new place—and in a foreign language to boot!
I was ten days in, and just the night before, I’d savored a three-hour solo dinner at a humble, charming, and serene agriturismo, celebrating the successful completion of the first major segment of my trip, a ten-day mostly-solo point-to-point trekking mission through the heart of the Gennargentu and Supramonte ranges in east-central Sardinia. All my research, preparation, and language skills paid off in spades, and the following day I’d mounted up on a rented scooter and driven south, aiming more or less toward the town called Ulassai where I’d started my trek, planning to stop somewhere along the way for a short day hike to break up the drive.
Always fond of following back roads just to see where they lead, after a cold morning drive over the pass at Silana, at midday I found myself parked in a disused picnic area above a small, dusty village, comparing the hiking route displayed on my phone to the ground truth in front of me. I already had a bad feeling, but there I was, and I was determined to make something of the day, so I set off.
The route that I’d searched up on the Wikiloc app popular with Italian hikers had me huffing up the steep, fresh cut of a fire road still raw and scarred from the rough work of a bulldozer. Once I gained some altitude, and increasingly dispirited by the worked-over landscape, I searched the tangled macchia for a way back to a narrower singletrack trail of the sort I much preferred, bushwacking in steep terrain along vanishing animal traces and then clambering over a recently erected barbed-wire fence before gaining more open ground as the slope moderated. Scanning the ridgeline, it became apparent that the nuraghic remains that had been my goal had been reduced to picked-over ruins and were fenced off to prevent even further decay, and that my sweaty, scratchy struggle had only led me to a dun, nondescript, and violently windswept hilltop decorated with bronze-age rubble, high-tension power lines, and goat manure.
Now, instead of feeling sanguine and accomplished, I was sad, lonely, unwell, and exposed to the elements. A fist gripped my guts and a narrow band of aluminum tension wrapped the inside of my skull, squeezing the meat of my brain from top to bottom. A chill ran down my neck and arms, and I imagined an all-too-familiar black ooze seeping upwards from the stones and pulling me down into an forgotten well.
Suddenly, my entire trip was in question. Why had I even gone to Sardinia at all, when there was plenty of world-class hiking right in California? Why had I rented a shitty little Piaggio 125 and then chosen to drive three hours in a frigid wind, watching my cellular signal bars dwindle to two, and one, and then disappear to nothing?
What on God’s green earth was I doing there? Something wasn’t right.
Now, thanks most of all to exactly the sort of practice that I went to Sardinia to engage in, by this point in life I’ve learned that it’s at least possible for me to recognize the physical feeling of an intuitive message making its way up from the depths of my psyche. As I’ve written about in the past, intuition often plays the role of guardian, shepherding us away from paths that may appear attractive but lead to unseen dangers, and back in a direction more suited to our present state of mind, our circumstances, the weather, what company we’re keeping, and whatever else.
I now know well enough that a message from within will only reveal itself once I allow myself to remember that discomfort usually indicates my unconscious is trying to tell me something, and that if I try to ignore, dose, or dope it until it goes away—aside from the fact that that doesn’t work anyhow—I’ll never get the chance to even become aware of what lies beneath, let alone act upon that information. Only if I do acknowledge what the feeling feels like can that bubble of buried awareness be freed to rise to the surface and break open, revealing its alchemic payload.
It’s also worth mentioning that I’d consumed far, far too much bread and cheese—all very tasty, and handy along the trail, but also much less varied—and less fibrous—than my usual diet. Many Italians are still under the impression that Americans eat nothing but hamburgers and hot dogs, and that their cuisine is so far superior as to preclude comparison—and while the pasta is amazing, I’d say that nowadays the food in California is (arguably, but overall) better than what one will encounter on the daily as a traveler in Italy.
Basically, all that bread, pizza, foccacia, and pane carasau had my gut well on its way to complete and total blockage, and so while the subtle psychic feeling that I’m talking about here is as real as anything else, it’s also true that it may well have been due in the first place to the fact that it had been far too long since I’d had a proper shit. Given the number of neurons in our lower ‘second brain,’ that ball of undigested glutinous goo may well have been the root cause of my greater discomfort or just a piece of the puzzle; either way, the physical feeling was impossible to ignore, along with the growing realization that I’d somehow lost the plot, along with my trust in my own wayfinding.
Having no other choice at the moment, I kept walking and rejoined the route as it descended towards a point labeled “strada Romana” on my digital map—and indeed, I soon came across a fifteen-meter stretch of weathered stone paving. In my unsettled state, I imagined a squad of Roman soldiers following their marching orders, only to reach the top and realize they’d been sent on a pointless exercise along a road to nowhere. Dejected just as I was, they would have turned on their heels and marched back down to the spring bubbling out of the hillside, around which, in modern times, a parking area and several benches had been constructed—the same spot where I’d parked my scooter.
Happy to be done with the day’s hiking, I was still at loose ends and unsure of my next move, my few belongings scattered where I’d dropped my backpack next to the machine. I dithered, looking around hopefully, saw nothing, and then dialed my girlfriend back in the States.
For much of my earlier life, I was so unaware of the intuitive processes percolating within myself that I remained frustrated to the point of depression by what I could only feel as a lack of information about how to navigate the world and communicate with others, and even about who this “I” that I was supposed to be even was. In those days and years, I almost always felt uneasy, anxious, and unwell, not only due to the direct effects of how I was living (which was itself a good part of the reason I had so little connection with myself), but also because my unconscious was constantly ringing all the alarms it could lay hands on, trying to shake me into even the most minimal state of self-awareness.
How was my inner guardian so absent, or unable to break through to make contact with my conscious self? Why did I remain for so long unable to trust myself at all, and why did I find myself in that unknowing, untrusting place again?
There’s a particularly nefarious tangle of bullshit that’s circulated for generations about how men are less intuitive, less self-aware, and less ‘emotionally intelligent’ a nativitate, and that these are somehow softer, more ‘feminine’ human qualities, while men are—so the story went—better at hard-edged, analytical decision-making, geometry, chainsaws, and spreadsheets. Although these unhelpful generalizations are a bit less frequently repeated nowadays, they still lurk in our popular consciousness, as does the related idea that conscious, thought-first decisions serve us better in the context of modern life (if there’s even such a thing at all; Harris and Sapolsky are both worth reading on the subject).
I think we’re making all of this way more complicated than it needs to be. My experience has shown me that men are not born less intuitive, at least to an extent that explains why so many of us struggle with knowing how to orient ourselves in life, what’s really right and good, or how we feel. I just don’t see how we could have evolved that way, missing such an important part of ourselves, and struggling so much because of it.
I’m far from alone in suggesting that the reason for much of our existential struggle is how we are acculturated away from intuition and towards decision-making by a culture and an economy that needs us not to pay attention to what we know to be true, but to override it in favor of job-, work- and income-seeking in a terminally insecure and disconnected social context. To play the game that we’re presented with—in truth of course, that we’ve constructed ourselves, all of us—we have no choice but to continually ignore and deceive our deeper selves. We have to, for our culture to remain credible.
No wonder we’re confused.
What’s more, just as we’ve raised men to be alien to love, we men have also learned to separate ourselves from our bodily senses. Historically, at least—it was men who went out to earn a living, away from self, family, love, and connection and into the increasingly abstract external constructs of work, career, and a professional life.
To my eyes, the cause for our lack of self-awareness is simple enough—it’s really just a lack of practice. We’re not as good at intuition as we could be simply because we’ve denied ourselves the opportunity to exercise that part of ourselves more often. As I’m fond of repeating like a mantra, we get good at what we do, and we cannot get good at what we do not do. Contrary to this obsolete mythology about men, intuition—or self-awareness, the sixth sense, second sight, the inner guardian, the Socratic daimon, the voice of self, embodied cognition, call it whatever you like—is not an innate talent, but an art that we can all practice, learn, and even become expert in.
We can practice intuition, and we can get good enough at listening to our inner voice so that it grows from a mystical and only occasionally-appearing, sort-of-spiritiual and most-often-unnoticed nudge to a readily accessible foundation of our daily lives, and even the primary basis for the depth, breadth, and direction of our entire path of years—which is only revealed, of course, as we travel along it.
Over the past fifteen years or so I’ve gone from someone so out of touch with my internal compass that its absence was a gaping, painful void to someone who can instead report with clarity that almost every so-called decision that I make is actually the result of sensing something that arises from within and following the resulting indizi—the clues along the way—as I put it to a fellow hiker there in Sardinia.
In fact, that’s precisely what I’d gone there to do: to practice my wayfinding and ground myself in the natural truth that emerges naturally from walking, not mindlessly along an obvious path but with the full senses required to navigate a vague and barely traveled mountain trail through foreign terrain.
These days, when I find myself engaged in some sort of analytical, pro-versus-con, return-on-investment needs assessment, or attempt to find the answer according to external input and arithmetic criteria, I take that not as an indication that I’m in the midst of a productive decision process, but instead that I am actively engaged in an over-complicated and needlessly intellectual rumination, busily constructing an edifice of resistance to and justification away from what must be a simpler, deeper, and more direct truth.
I’ve gone from a place where I didn’t trust myself at all to a place where, most days at least, I know in my bones that as long as I pay attention to that very same self that once was such a fucking mystery, I really can’t fuck it up.
There’s nothing particularly esoteric going on here. My intuition has been cultivated not in silent meditation or any sort of overtly spiritual practice but most of all through being active outdoors, in nature, and also together, in normal, open human communication with other people.
So why did I feel so lost?
For one, I had eaten way too much bread. Secondly, I was suffering from a sort of adventure hangover: the adrenaline of the final days’ push had been replaced with…rest and no particular plan. For the moment, I’d finished, and when I finished, I stopped moving, and when I stopped moving, I stopped sensing, and when I stopped sensing, I stopped knowing, and when I stopped knowing, I stopped trusting that I knew or would know where to go or what to do, and that reminded me of how it had been for me before, when I really didn’t know how or where to go or what to do at all, not just for a few minutes one sunny afternoon in Sardinia, but full stop, zero, at a total loss.
Of course I didn’t trust myself back then, in that confused and barren state of being—and others didn’t trust me much either. The cultural machinery that trained me to fail to recognize, discount, and persistently ignore my whole self had the necessary collateral result that I didn’t trust myself—and that therefore, or as a corollary, I was not to be trusted.
I know from talking and working with other men that many of them share their own version of these experiences. We’ve created a situation where trust no longer comes naturally from sensing the path, but is instead an achievement of a declared goal. If I say I’m going to do something, and I do it, then I’m a man of my word, and you can trust me—but this still allows for deception. I can say I’m going to do something contrary to my nature, and I can do it, and if you trust me on that basis, you’d be making a mistake. We both would.
On the other hand, if I’ve practiced listening to my wordless self, then I can speak what that deeper dreaming man would wish into words, and trust emerges naturally.
Men aren’t broken, nor less intuitive or less somehow trustworthy—and more logical decision-making is not how we’re going to find our way forward. Learning, practicing, and developing the skill of sensing self-awareness has been the single most powerful change that I’ve been able to find in myself, and that is what has grounded me and granted me the confidence that there’s at least a decent chance that I’m on a path that’s me on a daily basis.
That same set of skills is also what brings me into trustful and magnetic, interesting and sustaining connection with others. Wayfinding is a social skill just as much as a tool for navigation—and intuition is the foundation for both, as durable as the ancient stone towers that still stand in such great numbers here, as primordial as the limestone those stones are cut from, and as universally accessible as any path made simply from the walking.
Back in that unnamed roadside car-park, I paced in the dust, holding my phone to my ear. Homesick, lost, constipated, and just plain tired, I was grateful for the connection back to California and this beautiful woman’s loving invitation to come home soon. By the time we hung up, the message I’d been receiving up on the hill an hour before was clear: I’d been away long enough.
I breathed a sigh of relief as clarity washed over me, filled my water bottle from the spring-fed fountain, saddled up my ride, thumbed the motor to life, and set off southwards towards a place called Arzana—aria sana, “good air”—trusting that I’d find my way again.
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The series on “Trust”
Further Reading
- on David Deida: The Way of the Inferior Man
- on Culture-Bound Therapy (and other constructs)
Free Will, Sam Harris
Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, Robert M. Sapolsky
The Myth of Male Power, Warren Farrell
From the Core: A New Masculine Paradigm for Leading with Love, Living Your Truth, and Healing the World, John Wineland
The Art and Science of Connection: Why Social Health Is the Missing Key to Living Longer, Healthier, and Happier, Kasley Killam
Think Twice: How the Gut's "Second Brain" Influences Mood and Well-Being, Scientific American
Running Is a Kind of Dreaming: A Memoir, J.M. Thompson
my own intuitive Guide Service
Questions for you
What’s your own relationship with trust?
How does your own intuition, or self-awareness relate to your trust in yourself, and others’ trust in you?
How do you know you’re on the path that’s you?
When was the last time you embarked on a social adventure?
Please do leave a comment—and click the little ♡ heart
👇🏻 right down there to let me know if you found this worthwhile.
Deep insights, my friend. I'm jealous. Bread and cheese on long walks sounds quite nice.
I love the riff on and the solid reasoning behind “intuition.”
We—and culture—and pursuit—choke the channels within us that allow that intuition to bubble up.
Great trip as a framework for this essay BD. Well done. 👍