Confident Assurance

What is it?

Confident – feeling or showing confidence in oneself; self-assured.

Assurance – a positive declaration intended to give confidence; a promise.  Confidence or certainty in one’s own abilities.

Confidence – the feeling or belief that one can rely on someone or something; firm trust.  The state of feeling certain about the truth of something.  A feeling of self-assurance arising from one’s appreciation from one’s own abilities or qualities.

Wow!  They sound like the same thing, but they’re really not. I can’t fully explain what confident assurance is without it sounding like I’m repeating the same definitions listed above, but I can tell you I’ve witnessed it with my own eyes.

I like to watch people even when they don’t think I’m looking.  I listen to them even when it appears I’m not listening.  Sometimes I don’t respond right away, because I’m pondering, wondering, and allowing the ideas to roll around in my thoughts until I’m able to organize them into some semblance of understandable form.  I blog about what I’m trying to understand, because in order to write it I have to organize all those wayward thoughts into some semblance of cognate reasoning.

I have a friend that would be the prime model for Confident Assurance.  This characteristic emanates from his pores like pheromones as if it were an natural part of his DNA.  Maybe it is because he has a brother that seems to also exude many of the same qualities. I’ve watched this man closely, I’ve listened to him speak, I’ve observed him in many different scenarios, and this one thing is constant – this confident assurance.

I’ve watched his eyes look at one thing, yet see everything.  I’ve watched his body in both attention and rest, recreation and sleep, and even still it operates with the smoothness of confident assurance.  It makes me wonder if it’s something taught or something learned, or perhaps a mixture of both.

There’s a sense of authority, an unspoken wisdom, a deeper knowledge like a treasure hidden in a fortified chest that covers this man and all he does.  I envy and admire him and this quality, perhaps because I’m such the opposite in many ways and desire to obtain some of these qualities in myself.  Yet, I like the qualities I have.  I’m passionate, while he’s reserved.  I’m emotional, while he’s practical.  I’m a dreamer and react as if I already possess those dreams, while he is a realist and lives in the moment, rarely beyond the hour or even the day.  I’m clay, while he’s steel.  He inspires me and makes me want to be confidently assured.  I can only hope that I inspire him in a similar way, though I highly doubt it.

My friend told me this morning, “Observations are pointless without construction.”  I couldn’t agree more.  That’s why I sometimes don’t immediately respond or instantly fail to understand the morsel of wisdom being shared.  But that doesn’t mean it’s lost on me.  Those words or ideas will roll over and over in my mind until I learn to break them down, separate them, pull them apart, and then put them back together again.  Sometimes I make a complete mess and the result I end up with is a tangled misunderstanding. This happens most often when things are expressed that I have trouble hearing because of the damage of my previous scars, but I’m healing. Sometimes I’m able to reconstruct, knowing every part of these wise words and how they function.  The result - is confident assurance.

I love my friend just as he is and wouldn’t ever want to change him.  I celebrate and admire our differences.  I love me just as I am.  Sure, I’d like to walk with a bit more confident assurance like he does, and I’m working on it thanks to his influence, but I wouldn’t want to lose me in the process.  I’m not perfect, quite the opposite – perhaps the Queen of Imperfection, but I love, feel, experience, and speak with my whole heart. I live out loud in honesty. I’ll never be boring. Granted, sometimes I’m a complete mess and get a lot of things wrong, but I’m an honest mess.  In that fact …I am confidently assured.

Till next time,

~T.L. Gray