Normal

If there is one word that I have heard over the past two years, almost as frequently as Covid, virus, vaccine, it has been the word normal. Normal. But now, after all this time, what does normal look like?

Normal was gathering in groups with abandon. Normal was blowing out the candles on a birthday cake and then passing pieces around. Normal was hugging and kissing when greeting family and friends. Normal was singing in choirs, eating in restaurants, going to movies and sitting in crowded theatres. Now normal feels like caution, distance, all tinged with a slight degree of fear.

Will normal ever be what we once knew? I doubt it, because even normal is always changing. Like the seasons of the year, it often happens so gradually that it is only when we look up and sniff the air we know that change is upon us. Fall has come. Spring is near. The musty, damp earth sends the signals and there is change.

Normal changes at every transition in life. I am adjusting to a new normal. Having moved from the employ in ministry at BUC I am now shifting my normal to late nights, lazy mornings and thinking of the new responsibilities that will be mine shortly. There are touchstones of normal to the day. I begin with a large cup of black coffee and test my acumen at Wordle. But that normal only began a month or so ago when I discovered the game. I answer a morning trivia question – sent to me by my niece. This new normal began with Covid when she started this, now normal tradition, of sending me a trivia question every day.

The seed catalogues have arrived in the mail and soon the normal of shoveling snow will be replaced with the normal of cutting grass and weeding the garden. Of course, these are small bits of normal. There are bigger shifts that we accept as normal but were one day surprising, maybe fearful – penicillin, air travel, indoor toilets!

I am left wondering why we long for “so called” normal? Why do people keep talking about “getting back to normal”? What is it that makes us think what will come back is what we had and that what we had is what we still want? The hymn, ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’ , was written by Isaac Watts in 1719. It is based on Psalm 90. It was one of the hymns my mother chose to have sung at my father’s funeral. It holds the line, “A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone; short as the watch that ends the night before the rising sun.”

Normal today is a fleeting opportunity that shifts and changes to normal tomorrow. Let’s pledge to take the ride together!