We Don’t Need Normal

One of the most common questions heard round the globe since March 2020 has been, “when will things get back to normal?”

Normal was seeing friends and family without risk, normal was going to concerts, being in crowds, traveling freely, and not risking the side eye if you coughed or had the sniffles.

Normal was not having life impacted by a virus every day for the past two years.

We all yearn for “normal”, but in all likelihood what we knew as normal is not coming back, and we are still figuring out what “new normal” will actually look like.

But what if normal isn’t what we should be looking for, what if it is not what we need? A lot has changed in the last two years; some of those changes are good, and some of them are less than great.

The wider acceptance of remote work? Great. In fact this gave me the personal freedom to move to a new location and advance my career.

More focus on mental health and avoiding burnout? Great.

Labor shortages? Not great.

New divides among people caused or accelerated by the pandemic? Not great.

While I hope that some of the changes are not permanent, there are lessons from each of these changes that I hope we can take to heart and carry forward. Instead of looking for normal, we should be aiming for better.

We should embrace the idea that it is ok to take a non traditional path. We should encourage the creativity, the questions, and the spunk that leads to new ideas and innovations.

We should make mental and physical health jointly important, and recognize and respect the link between the two.

We should take the time to do we what we love, take the vacation, learn the new skill. The time spent on these is as necessary as the time spent on the “more productive” activities. Even if it is only 5 minutes a day

Perhaps most importantly, we should remember that life is fragile and short. You hear it all the time from people who have experienced a traumatic event; how they wish they had more time with the people they love, how they plan to make the most out of life from here on out. Whether we realize it or not, this pandemic has been a trauma to us all. It is something that we all now share, friends, enemies, and frenemies included.

The world deserves more than what was considered normal at the end of 2019. Let’s aim for better, not normal.