Living in a Time of Change
We are well into a moment of time when we are experiencing life as never anticipated or imagined. Working from anywhere other than home is seldom an option. No longer are we free to jump in the car and run a few errands without making detailed plans. We cannot meet up with our friends for a dinner out or stop for a glass of wine on our way home. There is no school as we came to know it. Worship takes place via Zoom. Entertainment is no longer as simple as buying a ticket and an overpriced bucket of popcorn. Have you noticed? Things have changed! And for a great majority of us…change is hard!
And when I am brutally honest with myself (and there are those rare moments!) I admit that I would rather “long for the good ‘ol days” than change. The way I often hear it expressed during the pandemic is in terms of “returning to normal” or arriving at a point where we can define and accept what “the new normal” will be. Sound familiar?
The Nonexistent “Normal”
Well…Newsflash…..”Normal” is a unicorn! It is imaginary! In Oxford’s terms, it is “…something that is highly desirable but difficult to find or obtain.”
Or, as Debra Jenkins put it: “There is absolutely no such thing as normal. There is only one place in this whole world that you’re going to find normal, and that’s in your laundry room on the dial of your dryer because normal…it’s a dryer setting.” (TEDx Huntsville 9/25/2014).
So, if change is far too difficult for us, and “normal” is a myth, then what are we to do? Is despair the only alternative?
Though she may put it a bit more negatively than I would be willing to state it, poet and activist Sonya Renee Taylor speaks truth when she says,
We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all humanity and nature.”
We are all too willing to let the pundits and professionals determine for us what normal is and what the new normal will be. In their speculation we are looking to find a sense of reassurance and confidence.
Creating the Normal
But I believe that the answer lies in our commitment to embrace the future as perhaps a once in a lifetime opportunity. To affirm that WE are the artists and architects of what will be “the new normal.” WE are the tailors of the new garment called the future, and together WE create it, one stitch at a time. We must not allow others to determine for us what is our unique “normal” for what is normal is as distinct and different as we are. Our value lies not in the conformity to the “normal” that we share, but in the differences that make us unique. It is only then that normal becomes a unicorn of our own making.
