There is a medieval legend I often return to when I think about how we relate to others and about what we decide is worthy of our trust.
The story involves Thomas Aquinas, still a young Dominican friar at the time. He was known for being quiet, withdrawn, even awkward. His fellow friars mockingly called him “the dumb ox”.
One day, as a joke, they called out to him and urged him to hurry to the window.
“Come quickly! There’s a donkey flying outside!”
Thomas stood up. He went to the window. He looked. The others burst out laughing. How could someone so intelligent believe something so obviously absurd? According to the legend, Thomas replied calmly:
“I would rather believe that a donkey could fly than believe that one of my brothers would lie to me.”
Whether these words are historically accurate matters less than the gesture of thought they express.
Thomas Aquinas was not naïve. He was one of the most rigorous minds in the history of Western philosophy. Yet in that moment, he chose to suspend disbelief not out of intellectual weakness, but out of trust. Not because a flying donkey was plausible, but because deliberate deceit by those around him seemed to him a worse assumption.
We live in a time that has trained us to do the opposite. The legal profession embodies this tendency more than most. Lawyers are educated to doubt, to unmask, to anticipate bad faith. Distrust is often mistaken for critical thinking, while trust is treated as a liability, if not as a form of intellectual naïveté.
But trust is not the same as gullibility. It is a moral choice before it is a cognitive one. It is the decision to take the other seriously, at least at first. It means accepting the risk of being wrong rather than inhabiting a world in which every word is already under suspicion.
The legend of the flying donkey does not ask us to believe everything. It asks us to consider the cost of believing nothing, and no one. A society built entirely on suspicion may avoid a few deceptions, but it loses something more essential: the very possibility of genuine relationship.
Perhaps, from time to time, it is still worth going to the window.
Even if nothing ends up flying.
