Just What Is Normal?

Here's a phrase I am hearing quite often these days . . . "When things get back to normal . . ."  It's usually said with a sigh, or a light chuckle.  But it expresses, more often than not, a bit of weariness, or impatience, or even, once in a whle, anger.  But what is normal?

I have a therapist friend who used to say, "Normal is just
a setting on a washing machine."  I'm not sure even that's true anymore, what with all the computerization one finds in appliances these days.  (My wife and I were looking at a new stove the other day with a very helpful appliance salesman.  Linda asked him if it had the old-fashioned kind of self-cleaning feature, or the new steam kind. The new er ones, he told us, are mostly all steam, because the old style, where you turned it up to 600 degrees for three hours, gets too hot for the computer-based parts.)

Whatever, my friend's point was that there really is no such thing as normal.  That the world changes all the time, and so do we.  Assuming we finally get past the pandemic, the world will be different than it used to be.  And while we will speak of that as "the new normal," it will quickly change into something different yet again.

I think we are wise to not be waiting for "normal" to return, whatever that was, but rather, doing our best to live here and now as fully (and as safely) as we can.  One day at a time.