Ditching Normal

The pandemic ushered in a new age, a new reality of masks and Zoom calls and social distancing and home schooling and remote working; a time when forced isolation upended our frantic, wild-paced lives and pushed us into a different way of life. If you read blogs (as I do - I have my favorites, but I read many…) there have been multiple expressions of how people have coped, and endured, and survived. It is admirable. It is inspiring. It is hopeful.

And yet.

It has also not escaped my notice that there have been numerous (I mean, lots and lots and LOTS) of whining and moaning about this past year’s loss of the “normal” of life, of things as they used to be. And there is no argument that the overwhelming disruptions caused by an honest-to-God pandemic was hard. Difficult. Gut-wrenching. But - as we emerge from our homes and apartments, our nests and cocoons, social media and the press drone on ad nauseam about the pandemic’s upending of our previously “normal” lives, and the great gratitude for returning to “normal.”

And I want to scream …. WHY? What was so wonderful and beautiful and amazing about how we used to live? And what is so horrible about learning news ways of doing, of seeing, of being?

There is no one who is more content with having a normal routine than me. I appreciate what routine can do in our lives. It can anchor a frenetically-paced life. It can soften the hard-edged shards of too much work and not enough play, smooth out those wildly-bumpy days of too many things to do, and so little time to do them. Having “normal” can soothe and comfort. It can bring us back to a place of calm.

But routine can also be a kill-joy. The normal of every-day can simply be just-oh-so boring. Too much of a good thing is never good, whether it is a routine, or a chocolate cake or a bottle of an amazing California Cabernet. Too much can escalate into obsessive-compulsiveness, gluttony, drunkenness. Too much of anything weakens us, and dulls our senses. It can lure us into a false sense of well-being that is nothing more than a tedious stretch of self-soothing that leaves us hollow inside - and dare I say it? Less-than. Not fully alive, weakly engaged in this wild earth-ride called life.

I want to rewrite the pandemic story. I think we should be grateful, falling-down-on-our-knees grateful, that SOMETHING kicked us out of the “normal zone”, the everyday routine of things. The pandemic was tragic in so many ways, (but so is war and genocide and tornadoes and flooding and racism and oppression - the pandemic certainly doesn’t stand alone in the “Tragic” box), and in recognizing that fact, why return to “normal” and pretend nothing happened? Doesn’t that make the entire year rather pointless?

Was it a difficult year? Of course. All the more reason we should make it count, acknowledge and embrace the tragic, and resolve to make it meaningful.

We should celebrate that the pandemic kicked us out of our comfort zone; that our complacencies were jolted, and in some cases blasted out of our existence. I think we should look upon the pandemic as a social-tsunami that forced us to reevaluate our routines, the “normal” things in our lives. The pandemic should be seen as a force that rocked our tidy, boring little worlds, and forced us to reevaluate, to revisit our realities and see what could be remade, reworked, revised into a better “normal”, into a kinder reality.

In order to grow, we need to keep changing - otherwise, what is the point? We need to occassionally burst out of our normal routines, the cocoons of our lives, and appreciate those things that cause us to evolve, to become new, different, better - even when they’re hard. Maybe especially when they’re hard. Whether we change our social constructs to be kinder, and more inclusive; or alter our sense of who is acceptable, desirable, beautiful - those changes in normal? I say, bring it on.

Perhaps we’ll get so good at changing out our routines and re-evaluting our “normal”, we won’t need a pandemic or other tragedy to jolt us into new ways of being. Perhaps we’ll emerge from our isolated cocoons on our own, ready to adapt and change into better, kinder, gentler people.

We can hope.