Who saw the following one coming? I have another wonder for you about time. This time it is a little different though. I can’t help but wonder about time in respect to everyone saying we’re returning back to normal. I want to discuss what that means, what it entails but more importantly ask the question or better said throw up the wonder of the mindset that has or has not been changed thanks to the times we are living in today.
A Year Where Everything Became Abnormal
Of course when I say the times we are living in today I mean specifically all things to do with the COVID measures from vaccines to regulations. This month it has been a year since the big outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. Of course it is stunning to believe that it really has been a year but that is something that we should just accept. I mean the time has already passed anyway.
Now with all the new things coming out I can’t help but wonder what back to normal is supposed to look like. Of course I understand what this means in theory. Going back to normal as we were used to in 2019. However how is that supposed to work in practice?
What About The Mindset Shifts?
What I can’t help but wonder about is what all we learned during this year?
I can’t help but keep thinking that this year was perfect for learning a whole lot of life lessons that I have been screaming from the top of my lungs for close to 5 years.
Time is not a forever thing.
Things change faster than you realize.
Time is the most precious thing you own.
In my posts ‘’Beauty in Chaos | What is Happening To The World” I already discussed that I hope the world finally realized these but now everybody is saying we’re going back to normal.
So then did we not learn anything? Are we just going to pretend this all didn’t happen? I can’t help but wonder whether that is even remotely a possibility.
I simply cannot compute that there hasn’t been any mindset shifts at all. I mean just look at all the adjustments people have done to keep afloat or to simply make things work during these times.
It is said by Oliver Wendell Holmes that;
A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
If you believe this to be true, how can we go back to normal life as we knew it? I mean the mind has definitely been stretched, no? Perhaps not for everyone in the same manner but definitely stretched in some type of way.
I can’t help but wonder if the mindsets developed during these abnormal times will just help us during these times? Or are there, perhaps specific, things that can be carried over to the other side of all this?
Personally I believe there are, even for the people who have not had whole mindset shifts. Perhaps not all of it is useful all the time, but then again what new mindsets are?
Back To Normal; What Exactly Was Normal?
When going back to normal life with or without a mindset adaptation there has to be a realization of change, right? That is inherent to going back to something in this case a way of life. If we are going back to normal are we going to skip the acknowledgment of this change?
To be honest the changes we made, albeit temporarily, were incredibly profound and deep cutting. Even temporary changes are changes. Seeing life has no eraser, to my knowledge, the changes brought on also had an effect, a change. So are we also going to ignore those?
All described here is what we would call going back to normal life. It’s what had to happen in order to be able to continue our “normal” lives at some point. However did we not see that a lot of things in “normal” life were not working? The fragility of humanness? Of course beyond sickness and health. All these things have been (painfully) highlighted, no?
Therefore I ask what is normal”, but also what was normal? Simply because after a year of living with these circumstances there is a case to be made that this has become our normal now. And because normal has always been a subjective term that enjoys the benefits of a consensus. And because of the developments made in mindsets and lifestyles.
Also the best I find is reading the news where people are saying that we are going back to our normal lives but we just have to do X, Y, Z in order to do something that is/was part of our normal lives but there are no changes as we’re going back to life as we knew it because we can do the thing again.
Read that sentence again.
The words make sense but they don’t add up when you give them proper thought and wonder.
So I ask you what is normal life? And how do we simply get back to it when knowing all these things. I can’t help but wonder.
Love,
DCPR.
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