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NO PLACE CALLED NORMAL
Wednesday Apr. 10, 2019
Getting back to normal has occupied my mind lately, a lot.
Things happen, life changes, routine disrupted, schedules change and I’ve reached that point of saying to myself: I want to get back to normal.
What is normal?
Where is normal?
Can I just buy a map, please?
Forget figuring out how to define normal …
There is no such thing. There is ‘routine’, ‘way I operate’ but we can hardly define this package of lifestyle, workstyle and activities as normal – they are just usual and comfortable.
‘The way things are, or were’ before something happened. Then something happened. Something changed and suddenly we aren’t the same. Difficult to describe in physical terms and difficult to escape in emotional ones.
Life changes slowly over time.
Or in an instant.
Friends and frequent readers might think what I’ve just written is about last week, about Barry’s death and my trip to his funeral – and the upheaval to my schedule last week.
Sure, it’s about that.
But it’s about a lot more that has been ruminating in my gut a while.
Maybe last week’s feelings are bringing this to a head, or more likely ‘warning to self’ it is time to pay closer attention to all of this – catalyst for fresh thinking, for better understanding.
There is so much time, and there is so little time – depends how you look at it as our time, my time, your time or the earth’s time.
We talk climate change and visit fossil-rich canyons – we look forward and backward with millennia in our minds. We stare at the stars and count the billions of them, and think in terms of billions of years as measurement of ‘real time’. We visit libraries and museums and have centuries in our minds, yet few of us will live to a hundred let along thousands of years.
What is 50 or 80 or a 100 years?
Just too short!
So should we ‘get our affairs in order’ and wait, for the end – or should we start brilliant new things and work our tails off as if there is no tomorrow?
Let that be our new normal.
Hair afire, full boar, headlong – let us plunge into something new that nobody will dare label normal.
Reader feedback:
Wow! Where did that come from, Mark? Not really a question; more of a musing (to borrow your trademark). I’ve enjoyed reading many of your musings; seldom, if ever, has one sounded this angry. Not a criticism, that; just hoping you’re okay?, DP, Calgary, AB
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