"The New Normal"
Everyone has learned to sleep in, except Linus who still wants let into my room at 6:30 am to have his face stroked and soft belly rubbed. He missed the memo about the world-changing.
I keep hearing people toss around the phrase "the new normal". "Is this the new normal?" "I can't wait for the new normal." It makes me have a lot of feelings. I understand the thing they are longing for, and I guess it's like hearing someone from a religion you used to practice long ago. I want to gently shake my head and simply say, "I don't believe in that anymore." Maybe I will be wrong in the end. Maybe there is some sweet and quiet future waiting for me and I will have to come back and tell you: I was wrong! There WAS a new normal waiting right there for me, and I lived there happily ever after.
But mostly I regard this as an illusion I have been relieved of over and over again. I waited for years, actually, and wave after wave kept crashing on my shores until I figured out it was better to learn how to swim instead of trying to stand. Standing doesn't happen for me. And this latest development honestly doesn't feel so different (aside from the abject global horror, fear and mass casualties part). I've already been disrupted, undone, facing futures I cannot entirely imagine for long enough that I don't remember another way. It is finally becoming familiar--the sensation of unfamiliarity.
I've rewritten the paradigm. Yes, this is unprecedented, I want to say, but don't you think it's also just life? And if it weren't this, wouldn't it be some other storm? Aren't most of us also managing a couple of other natural disasters on the inside? I kind of think we are. I hope this time teaches us that we are always vulnerable, always interconnected and in need of community, and that we hold one another and ourselves with so much gentleness going forward. If there is a "new normal", that would be a good one to find. One I could believe in.