Life ever hardly goes back to normal the way before once this said normalness gets disrupted, yet it's almost an inherent human ability to do our level best to try taking life back to normal.
I wonder what normalness we're seeking here, the one with the comfortable ignorance we used to enjoy, or one without the scars recently acquired?
Catching up like old times is one of my least favourite phrases to utter when crossing paths with old friends, primarily because it feels like a request to perform a version of myself that has long since retired.
I'm thinking of exploring normalness on a mundane level here, via returning to past times with a good degree of known certainty. I tend to notice old friends crave that type of script, say wanting to have the dialogue to flow just as it did five years ago because that predicts a safety of sorts that they felt to have lost.
On my side, the script is dusty. I have nothing against the past; good or bad times don't last, and reminiscing about those times is similar to revisiting a sport I used to play but no longer do.
The muscle memory is there, I know the rules, and for a moment it feels natural to be back on the field, but if I stay too long, I realize my stamina for that specific game is gone.
For its own sake or as a conversation starter, I could very well default to picking a segment of good old times and run with it, only to transition sometimes very quickly into the present/future.
Low volatility existence
My subconscious thought process behind that is rooted in a realization that normalness seems to be taking a new form that's quite hard to figure out at the moment, so prefer a pivot to the present because the past is a statue, while the present is a moving target with usually a lot of exciting things to converse about.
I think what creates a sense of normalness is having a relatively enough period of certainty where the modus operandi of things are predictable enough that we don't have to clench our jaws.
"Normal" is usually associated with with a lack of surprise. However on a broader level, that ground seems to be shifting especially as of late.
Could it be normalness itself is now a sense of near constant uncertainty as opposed to a relatively constant certainty?
If I were to analyze my sentiment of the pre-COVID era, the "data" might show a trend line of expected continuity, like a 'low volatility' existence through which tomorrow was almost guaranteed to be roughly the same as today. The baseline emotion was a calm, perhaps even naive, assurance.
In contrast, the current era's sentiment is arguably and generally defined by high-frequency spikes of change. So many fires have bit lit up, both figuratively and literally with no clear sense of which ones I'm supposed to put out first.
Having swapped the comfort of stasis for the necessity of vigilance. I can also discern a sense of normalness coming from the chaos itself.
If the water is always choppy, eventually, choppy becomes the baseline. It's not always tilted towards one side of the good or bad, but rather it is simply the state of flux.
Unfinished thought
I guess what I'm trying to get at is either I don't think we're going back to anything, and I'm not sure we're going forward to anything either. We're just going, and that could be the new normal, for now.
Or the friends who want to "catch up like old times" could actually be asking "are you still the person I knew how to be around?"
In that case, how to answer that honestly without disappointing them is something I'd have to figure out each time, since there's no template for saying "I've changed" that doesn't seem like a rejection.
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