Trust is a really important concept and fundamental to our society. Everyday, our society functions on trust. We might trust the sun to rise each day, that there will be food to eat, that our loved ones will be there. It's about confidence and believe. I know that my money has a certain value for instance. I am lucky to live in the UK where life has a certainty to it and there are many things I can trust in. Life is not so certain everywhere or at all times and change inevitably happens.
I remember in history at school we studied Germany and we learnt that inflation was completely out of control there in the early 1920s. Germany had huge war debt and printed money that was not backed by gold or any other resource. The value of their currency fell and a loaf of bread which cost 160 Marks in 1922 cost 200,000,000,000 Marks in 1923. People literally used wheelbarrows to transport money. Workers were often paid twice per day as prices were changing so quickly that they quickly became worthless and money was literally not worth the paper it was printed on. Nobody trusted the currency.
Life has been pretty stable in places like the UK for a long time and we have gotten pretty used to that which has made the events of the last year or so particularly hard to adjust to. Life was particularly uncertain at the beginning as few of living people in the UK had been through a pandemic like this. It caught people by surprise... Too much certainty, too much trust can be bad for us because we still need to maintain a certain flexibility, the ability to judge.... For instance, it's better to trust a builder with the job of putting up an extension who has a good reputation and reviews rather tan someone who turns up on your doorstep offering to do the job for a very low cash price...
I remember that I began to see articles on Covid and realised it was serious when China started building hospitals at a speed that was incredible. By September 2020 the official death toll stood at 4634 in China and it just seems incredible to me and completely unbelievable.... Such a death toll seems very unrealistic when compared to the effect Covid has had on other countries who at least knew it existed when it reached their shores and were prepared to fight it. China denied it's existence for some time and when they accepted the reality of it, their reaction was on a scale that suggests it was a much larger problem. I once heard a rumour, friend of a friend of a friend that 1,000,000 telephone numbers were deactivated following China's first wave. Trust is an issue...
From the point of the hospitals being built, my ears were pricked and as soon as cases were identified in Italy, it was clear to me that Covid was out and it was going to have a huge impact on our lives, though I couldn't comprehend the scale. I remember asking my boss if they had started thinking about homeworking and she looked at me like I was crazy and asked what for. A week later I tried again and enquired about a mobile so I could check my emails and even in that short time, the situation had changed and they looked at me like I was perhaps panicking a little but was not completely crazy. Meanwhile Covid was spreading in Italy and tourists from all over Europe were visiting for the school break, completely unaware, before they took Covid home with them.
I think one of the things really impacted by Covid has been trust. On the one hand, something really bad has happened and life goes on, our systems continue to function and our country is definitely taking steps to keep tings going. On a smaller scale, communities have really come together to look after people. On a less positive note, while some sorts of crime are much lower, the streets being empty has allowed some negative behaviours to flourish. Theft of dogs has risen considerably and I find that the streets feel just a little bit less safe, even in the middle of the day.
But Trust is so important to me... I trust that everything will be OK. That no matter what happens I will do my best and I will cope... that should the worst happen, things will still be OK. It's a nebulous sort of thing, trust at that level. Everything will be exactly as it's supposed to be... I still have a responsibility to take action, it isn't a blind trust. I guess it's much like faith.
I chose blues for this design because it feels like a river, that carries you along. Little eddies in the current...
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