There Is No Going Back To Normal
The word that puzzles me the most is — normal. The more I try to understand the more it gets muddled. The answer seems easy to grasp. Normal is the red of an apple. Normal is the blue of the sky. Normal is the way things are or rather the way things should be. This ‘should’ must not be questioned further. It is the panacea that is supposed to cure all curiosities; only if it could. Curiosity does not need a cure neither an explanation but a revelation. I am sure no one has reached to the revelation of ‘being normal’ yet.
There is a collective resentment to this pandemic that is not only financial. The loudest notion says the economy is suffering when there have been record-breaking surges in the consumerism and supply-chain in all sort of industries. Companies contributing most to the climate crisis has grown the most during this dire time. Even those who made a fortune share the resentment. What is this resentment for? It is for the change in the way things should be. All kinds of efforts have been made to go back to normal. The very normal that has birthed this situation.
I carry the burden of an old animosity towards the word ‘normal’. But now I feel bad for it. Unlike all the rhetorical constructs, rich, poor, good, bad, ect., this one is underrated. There are no values attached to being normal. It’s just normal. Its existence thrives on having being taken for granted; to be ignored. It just needs to be there in the background silently. However, its absence is louder than bombs. Normalcy comes in the limelight, like it has now, when it feels like it is not there anymore. Quite in contrast with the god of all rhetoric — God.
Effortlessness is often confused with comfort when both are logically and biologically opposite. There is no comfort without effort. And effort doesn’t have to be uncomfortable. Change is demanded at the cost of effort: an oxymoron. Even breathing needs effort; we are seeing the reality of it. We have our motivational quotes that we read and tattoo on our skin but never let it assimilate, which brings another topic I will soon write a new article about. Here, it is about the demand of ‘going back to normal’. When it comes to normal it is always about going back. We never say let’s go to the normal. And we must not. Because that would encapsulate the problem. The problem must never become normal. When the problem is normal there is a tacit compulsion to live with it.
What would be there if there is no normal? Exactly what there is. We are not that brittle to be shattered in change. We are supple. We regenerate. We need not to go back or look back. We need to look at now and keep walking ahead, one step at a time. I never had anything normal because I never knew, neither wanted to know, what is normal. And there have always been people like me. May be its time to show the ones, who only know to live ‘normally’, that the reality depends on how you see it. Normalcy is nothing but a perception. All perceptions are errored and all perceptions can be altered. We need not to hang on to the perceptions but look and feel beyond.
What is my animosity with normalcy? As a child, I tried harder than anything else I had ever tried to become normal. Only the child did not know what was normal. Whenever I probed, I was silenced with the ‘should’ or ‘this is the way things are’. The meaning of that vague ‘this is the way things are’ was never explained but I was stubborn. Many years later I finally found out what was going wrong. The way out of the normalcy maze was to stop and look at the-way-things-are, not just know it. From that vantage point everything was absolutely comprehensible. I understood when we don’t want to put effort to understand, we label things as ‘the way things are’. This whole mystery of being normal was a sham. No one was normal. No one was the same. There was no one way for the things to be. But normal was convenient.
This is a personal blog. I have written what I think. But I also see an urgent necessity for understanding better collectively, specially in the circumstance we are in now. We can never go back in time. We can never go back to what was normal. We must never go back. Why not let go of the yearning for being in the normal and be here. Even if it’s not convenient, even if it’s disturbing, it is the only reality. And we are living in this reality. We can either see or escape. There is no escape from the reality. The more we fight the weaker we get. But if we see, we can look at what is wrong. It will be uncomfortable but it will give us the power to make things right; to live well. Then we might never need to create a normal to escape the reality.
