New Normal

People keep throwing around this notion of “when things go back to normal.”  My biggest fear is that those folks don’t realize that normal as we know it has significantly changed.  We haven’t yet experienced the work of COVID-19.  It will impact each of us in some way.  With an experience, it’s hard to go back to a world we knew before.

A quote by Olive Wendell Holmes, Jr. rings true to our current state:

“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”

I used to share this quote with clients I worked with in wilderness therapy.  The feared returning home or moving on in life and that they would slip back into old patterns.  In reminding them that it could never go back to what it was before, because of their experiences, it seemed to provide a calming sense of embracing the future.  In a time of pandemic, I can’t help but wonder if this is minimizing the shifting mindset of our world.

With COVID-19 here now, the concept of public health and overall well-being can never go back to what it was.  We are in disbelief that it will impact us, and yet medical detox beds are being shifted to providing beds for those infected and on ventilators.  If anything, the collective mental health of the world is at a stand-still.  We are all still struggling.  We are all still trying to grasp at the reality of this situation, as we watch an ever-growing red-dotted online map spread. 

In seeing this spread, you must comprehend that life as we know it will not go back to how it was.  It’s shifting, and we must embrace the new normal.  The new normal will include doomsday preparations.  The new normal will include taking seriously a spreading virus when it’s in a different country.  The new normal will include more face masks, hand sanitizer, and less physical human contact.  It won’t be forever, but it will certainly never go back to the way it used to be before COVID-19.

For questions or comments contact Joanna.