The Trust Convoy: Basic Trust in the Fog

Lately, I’ve been sitting with the idea of Basic Trust — not the Hallmark kind, and definitely not the “trust everybody with everything” kind. I mean the deeper, more practical kind: the quiet assumption that life is workable and that other people aren’t automatically the enemy. It’s the kind of trust you don’t usually notice until something happens that makes you rely on it.  That’s how it is for me, anyway.

I first ran into this idea through the Center for Collective Wisdom, drawing on A. H. Almaas. He calls Basic Trust a non-conceptual confidence in the goodness of the universe — basically, a wordless sense that there’s something in life that’s solid enough to lean on. You don’t have to philosophize about it to know what he means. Most of us have felt it at some point — especially in moments when things get uncertain, and we discover we can’t do it alone.

Before I dive in, let me say this clearly: Basic Trust is not the same thing as pretending everything is fine. The world has sharp edges, and some folks are carrying fear that is fully grounded in experience. Safety is not evenly shared, and I’m not trying to gloss that over. This isn’t about being naïve. Trust isn’t the absence of danger; it’s how we move with each other in it. What I’m curious about is how, even in a world with real threats and real harm, human beings sometimes find a way to coordinate, protect, and guide each other through — and what it would take to do more of that on purpose. 

What stirred this up for me were two driving stories — one my husband’s, one mine.

My husband was driving home from Murphy’s recently when the fog got thick. The kind of white-knuckle fog where your world shrinks down to a few taillights and the outline of the road. And he noticed something I can’t stop thinking about: all at once, the cars around him started moving together. Same speed. Same spacing. Not tailgating, not racing — just quietly matching each other. Because in that kind of fog, the safest thing is to stay connected to the pocket of visibility you share.

Nobody called a meeting. Nobody negotiated roles. But a temporary team formed anyway.

I’ve been in that team too.

Years ago, my sister and I got caught on Highway 1 in an extreme coastal downpour. Visibility was awful. There were maybe five cars in our little line. And without anyone announcing anything, we became a convoy.

Each time we reached a turnout, the lead car would pull over and let the rest of us pass. Someone else would take the front for a while. Then, at the next turnout, that person would pull over and let the next car lead. Over and over. Strangers rotating the role of leader, guiding each other through our own fear and uncertainty.

What stays with me isn’t the fear. It’s the speed of the trust.

Kenneth Arrow once called trust “an important lubricant of a social system.” In fog or rain, trust is what keeps everything from grinding to a halt. We can’t plan or agendize our way through that kind of uncertainty. We have to cooperate. We have to rely on each other.  And quickly.

Niklas Luhmann says trust reduces the complexity of the future. In plain language: when the world gets uncertain fast, trust is how we keep moving.

So here’s the question I keep coming back to:

Why does trust wake up so easily in fog and rain — when it’s life-threatening — but go right back to sleep in ordinary life?

Maybe because ordinary life gives us time to pretend we’re separate. Time to protect turf. Time to narrate each other as risks rather than as companions or community. 

Bad weather doesn’t give us that luxury. It cuts through the stories. We don’t have time to be suspicious and survive. So we reach for what’s already there: the basic trust that says, your safety is tangled up with mine.

And here’s the part that matters to me as a coach and a community person: those moments in the storm that my husband and I experienced aren’t actually rare. We see small, everyday versions of them all the time — not because people are suddenly saintly, but because the situation makes trust the smartest way through.

Think about it:

Four-way stops or traffic lights when the lights are out.
Nobody’s directing traffic, but people fall into a rhythm. One goes, then the next. Eye contact. A small wave. It’s not just politeness — it’s a shared agreement to keep everyone safe and on their way.

The moment a line-level staff says, “Here’s what I’m seeing,” and leadership adjusts.
Basic trust means treating lived experience as data—not as noise. No one has to “earn” the right to be taken seriously in that moment; the work requires it.

Community meetings after a tense incident.
The first time someone speaks honestly and isn’t punished or dismissed, the whole room shifts. People begin to risk truth because the group has proven it can hold it.

Parents at a playground keeping a loose collective eye.
Your kid wanders near another adult for a moment, and you trust the vigilance of strangers — not because you’ve vetted them, but because the shared space calls for shared care.

Those are everyday convoys. That’s Basic Trust.

Clear-eyed and connected — that’s the posture I’m after.

And one more thing I keep learning the hard way: Basic Trust isn’t the same as liking someone. I can find you irritating, disagree with you, or just not click with your style and still hold a deeper trust in your humanity — that you’re not automatically a threat, that you’re trying to protect something you care about, that you have a real stake in the shared road we’re on. Basic Trust is what makes “clean conflict” possible: saying the hard thing directly, holding boundaries, refusing contempt, and staying in a workable relationship even without warmth. In other words, I don’t have to want to have coffee with you to believe we can still get each other home. Although coffee helps.

So if Basic Trust is something we can practice before the storm — and not just a pretty idea to admire — here are a few questions I think are worth asking ourselves (to start):

• Where in your work or life are you already moving in a convoy — but forgetting you are? A team, a family system, a community project, a department?  What makes those conditions possible?

• What helps you trust people faster when things get hard — and what gets in the way when things are calm?

• What’s one small move you could make this week that signals “we’re in this together”? Not a grand gesture. Something ordinary: a clearer handoff, sharing information sooner, slowing the conversation down when it gets tense, assuming goodwill in an interaction, telling the truth kindly when it would be easier to stay vague or avoid it altogether, practicing a basic kindness.

Because the fog will come again. The rain will come again. The question is whether we want to wait for danger to remember we belong to each other — or whether we can practice the kind of basic trust that helps us make it home when we drive like we’re connected.