The meaning of trust and the trust of meaning

For a young man or woman, newly independent, setting up on their own, coming to terms with their compassionate selves; for them the best way, the most sincere way, is boycotting animal stuff. That’s one huge statement of compassion. It’s a wonderful thing when you see it. It’s enough to make old-old vegans want to break out the champagne!
Compassion doesn’t come cheap. It involves a complex weighing of advantages and disadvantages, and experimenting with new ideas. This is important weighing, the outcome of which could affect the rest of one’s life. A young person needs to know they’re going to be safe - safe in a nutritional way - if they go ahead and take on a vegan-diet. It is a risk. We can only make that choice based on information received, friends, books etc. The decision requires trust - like bungy jumping, where you have to trust the strength and length of the rope. (Too cowardly, this one, ever to have done it - not enough trust that elastic bands would saves me from plunging to my death).
Trusting a new idea might take a whole lifetime (even many of them!) ... or it could happen in the twinkling of an eye. It comes down to where we’re at, regarding new ideas and taking them on board, especially where so much is at stake over food content. Once we’ve weighed pros and cons and finally arrived at a clear picture and decision, we have to trust it and go with it ... (as with ‘going vegan’). Trust bases itself on foreseeing the next stage, then the next stage after that, and instinctively feeling okay to proceed. It’s rather like climbing a hill, each step feels like hard work. But once we intend to climb it we deal with everything we meet on the way - and if we meet the unexpected or unwelcome we try to cop it sweet.
When we ‘present our self’ to a new idea and voluntarily take on all the hard work it calls for, we can find it, strangely enough, to be NOT like slogging away at hard labour. Working on a new idea isn’t the sort of work you get easily bored with. Quite the opposite, it’s gripping. ‘Meaning’ and ‘work’ meld together.
Part of this ‘new reality’ is so unlike previous work-experience that it’s hard to get used to it. Maybe we can’t believe our luck, to have stumbled over it. ‘Work’ is usually associated with factory, office or paid employment at which we spend inordinate numbers of hours dreaming of weekends and holidays. It’s quite different when work is meaningful, as is a taken-up-new-idea. New ideas give rise to imagination and give a new meaning to ‘work’.
The work of promoting vegan principle and living by it is a new type of work, not often paid and most serious work too ... and it can be frustrating, because we’re breaking so much new ground ... so things take longer. Everything needs background-ing, which means learning new and not necessarily interesting things (for instance, about modern animal husbandry methods). At first progress seems slow, and isn’t helped by the ‘omnivore-resistance factor’ or fellow activists dragging their feet. But this is a right-of-passage for vegans. We have to go through each stage of frustration to find out what sort of vegan we are going to be - a quiet one or a noisy one. If we do decide to talk with others, if we make any breakthroughs with them there’s nothing quite like it. It can be satisfying like no other satisfaction. Here we are, communicating the most important subject in the world (important not merely because we’re saving people from obesity but because we’re helping to provides a panacea for our age). Yes, it’s wonderful when it happens. But most often a wall of resistance faces us, and for good reason. We are ultimately seen as ‘the enemy’ to omnivores.
Animal Rights is a fascinating subject. It’s substantial enough to get our teeth into, communication-wise! It’s up hill, hard work, and urgent too but it’s never uninteresting. And never, for one minute, insignificant to the future of both planet and our own species. And certainly, we sometimes may need to stress that we aren’t the enemy!