When will things be back to normal?

There’s a lot of talk of normal at the moment – about things feeling ‘normal’ (or not!), about going ‘back to normal’, or looking ahead to the ‘new normal’. But what is normal anyway?

I get it, things are different, things are new, and things are changing. The default reaction to change is often a feeling of loss – you think of all the differences in terms of a loss of familiarity, security or comfort. Have you ever been in an office when the seating plan changes?! Wow. In reality, the same people are performing the same roles in the same organisation – but their seat has moved to a different desk. Full scale meltdowns have occurred… ‘but I’ve sat with Brenda for 16 years’, ‘I’m closer to / farther from the toilet/kitchen/printer/air con’, ‘it just feels different’. Very few people seem to view these kinds of changes as a positive, that leaving the ‘old’ way behind opens up an opportunity for something new which may well turn out to be better. That’s not anybody’s fault, it’s just the way humans work.

I think the same is going on now – changes have been forced upon us and many people are clinging to any sense of familiarity they have (to feel normal), looking for the old familiarity to return (going back to normal) or hoping that whatever happens next will in some way feel familiar (the new normal). Do we really want normal though? Just routine and ordinary? Something entirely familiar?

“The only thing that is constant is change.”

Time hasn’t stopped, we’re not in a situation where ‘normal’ has been paused and will resume again at some point. The world will not be identical again, and how could it be, that’d mean we’ve learned nothing over the last few months. Whatever your situation is right now, is your reality, and tomorrow’s reality may well be different again. It has always been like that, we’ve always adapted to our individual situation day by day, maybe it feels different in some way now due to the shared experience of so many people facing similar changes at the same time? We’ll all keep on adapting, that’s also the way humans work.

I wonder what things you should be proud of now given the circumstances you’ve already adapted to? And what brilliance have you been putting off because you’re waiting for the right time - waiting for ‘normal’ to return? We all plan to do things ‘one day’, maybe we shouldn’t be waiting for things to be back to normal first though, who knows what that means or when that may be.