Wishing Things Were Back to Normal is the New Normal

But what is normal anyhow?

“I wish things were back to normal!”

Lately, I’ve heard these words a lot. In the store. On the street. At the wine bar. Dissatisfaction, irritation, vexation: these hang in the atmosphere like dark smoke.

It is, after all, the smoke that disrupts our lives. The smoke — and its companion, fire. In our forests, fires blaze and torch the green that once was Oregon. Smoke collects like clouds of purple poison. Thick. Dense. Acrid. It burns the nose and heart.

In Oregon, these fierce fires are called abnormal — especially on the wet and western side of our state. Historically and geographically, they’re an anomaly.

This summer, 900,000 acres burn. Thousands of homes are ash. Masses have evacuated. Millions are on standby, waiting for commands to get ready, get set, or go.

It’s said it’s an abnormal fire season. That it’s been an abnormal time.

Hence the ubiquitous words on the street: “I wish things were back to normal!”

But what is normal, anyhow?

Does normal always conform?

“Normal” comes from the Late Latin normalis, meaning in conformity with the rule. Normal likes rules and notches and metrics. Normal once described something made with a carpenter’s square that needed to fit exact angles in order to be properly aligned. Over time, something conforming to a set pattern or standard became considered normal.

But what is normal can change. It alters. It can morph and mold into a new pattern. A new standard. Or a even a newer, nuanced normal that once was abnormal.

Rough road to abnormality

I learned about the normality of abnormality the usual way. The hard way.

Over 3 years ago, my son died. Immediately, I was cast into a world, an existence, a reality that I never imagined. And yet, here it was. There was no escape.

Suddenly, normal was flung upside down. I had to learn to live in a world without sense. A world without the loud laughter, crooked smile, and stomping feet of my son, who should have lived on long after me.

And immediately, the attempts to normalize began.

“Welcome to your ‘new normal.’” Friends, neighbors, family, experts: so many spoke these words. And I hated them immediately.

New normal may have been well-intended, but to me, it seemed distancing, disabling, and deterring. I didn’t want to be forced into the box of abnormal normalcy. I didn’t want my world defined as something that was out of reach, out of experience, out of mind.

New normal. Those words seemed false. Isolating. “Stay over there in your corner,” they bullied. “Away from us normal ones.”

New normal wanted to push me away from normal life. Wasn’t the proof that I was living this bereaved, be-mourned existence without my son valid in and of itself? Didn’t my personal lived experience qualify?

Extremes frighten us. I get that. No one really wants to imagine the death of a child.

But my life, your life, the life of the stranger I glimpsed on the bus last Thursday: all are vastly different. Yet so close. So similar. All of us will smile through heights of happiness. And all of us will sometime sink into despair. These are common human experiences, yet each unique as an artist’s thumbprint.

Collectively, we’re normed to life’s ups and downs — and everything between. But individually, each tragedy and each joy tells its own story.

Normal is a fairy tale (told by idiots, signifying nothing).

Life as (un)usual

The usual.

The normal.

The standard.

We use these terms constantly. Unthinkingly. Each assumes a common and average way of things.

But average is an error.

Oh sure, it’s logical. Mathematically, the average is a merging of the highest and the lowest and the everything between-est. It’s the middle of the road. It’s all values altogether, spliced and diced. It’s a sum divided by its counted integers. But you know this. Heck, even I recall it from 3rd grade math class.

But lives are not numerals. And our experiences are not average-able.

There’s no way to quantify a life. A loss. A lingering regret. An expectant moment. A quiet fear. A sudden, joyful love.

We dwell in non-averages. We reside in the unusual. We inhabit abnormality.

And our normal is not normal. Not in any way at all.

A refugee state of mind

The town is empty. Most of us have fled, heading north, west, east — wherever we could escape the oncoming flames of insistent fires. The searing, scarring heat. The hiss and twist of burning green.

We sleep in campers. We show up on the doorsteps of close friends. We sleep in the spare rooms of distant family. We stay in hotels.

We scan the news, studying its exclamations of burned-out cars and skeleton houses. We refresh the fire map, fixating on its creeping ember edge.

We’ve become a land of refugees. Lost from our homes. Lost from our towns. Loosed from our calendars and jobs — and saved from taking out the trash on Monday nights.

“I can’t wait until we can get back,” a neighbor writes on the local Facebook group. “I can’t wait until things get back to normal.”

But after this, what’s normal?

Norms of a nation?

2020.

After this year, what is normal? After this, what is average?

Politics, COVID, racism, riots. Fires, feuding, and fury. Opiates, overdoses. poverty, pain. Education, elections, egregious error. Inequality, inequity, injustice.

People pushing, wanting, forcing change. Demanding norms be buried, busted, broken.

Resistance. Repayment. Recovery.

Not conforming. But desiring and demanding more. De-normalizing business as usual. De-norming.

Moving the borders of normal to include more of us. All of us. Together.

The fire. The finite. The finish.

The fires surround us. We leave. We wait.

These fires will burn themselves out. They’ll fade to ember and ash. The smoke will fade to wisps on a far horizon.

The fires surrounded us. They burned. We return. We begin anew.

Soon, things will get back to normal, we think.

Always, we remember what was. Eternally, we look to what’s next. That was normal. This is not. In truth, it’s all normal — every whit and bit of our pain and our fear. Every moment of panic and peace.

We are in this experience now. We reside in this moment. We wade and wallow through. We struggle. We laugh and we cry. We find our footing even as we stumble on. This is our not-normal — each day its own uniquely ubiquitous event.

Every day, we shift the borders of normalcy. As we search and struggle. As we lift and languish. As we rise. Fall. And rise again.

“I can’t wait until things get back to normal.”

Things will never get back to normal. They were never normal to start.