As we're starting to emerge from the pandemic, I've been thinking a lot about the term "the new normal." Since we all shared this pandemic experience globally, we're at a stage now that's so common in grief: trying to figure out what comes next.
The New York Times article about languishing has been making the rounds and it's a very important experience to dissect. In fact, the suggested remedies to languishing are very similar to the steps we take in coaching to help clients pull themselves out of whatever it is that's holding them back. Languishing is linked to the new normal because languishing most often happens when we simply don't know what the new normal is.
I can only speak from my experience after being widowed but this will probably resonate with many of you because all of our worlds - the most macro of macros to the most micro of micros - were upended last year. Similar to losing a partner, our worlds just... stopped. We couldn't see people, we couldn't go out, we couldn't do much at all. Relationships were strained in ways we never imagined, work shifted on a dime - and then again and again. None of our normal venting arenas were open to us. And while it was wonderful to see how quickly we all adapted to Zoom sessions, the idea of yet more screen time for something like an exercise or a yoga class became intolerable.
So. What now? Do we jump backwards and pretend 2020 didn't happen?
I asked this constantly right after losing Bill and again after losing Klaus: What now? What was I supposed to do? And how was anything supposed to be "normal" again?
The prevalence of the term "a new normal" is incredibly misleading. It implies that things are supposed to be steady, constant, and never changing. This is not true of any area of life: everything is always changing, evolving, growing. Most of those changes are small and we don't notice them in our daily experience. It's the big ones that grab our attention, for better or for worse.
What will our new normal be? I suggest we stop pushing so hard. Something that I find very encouraging about Millenials and Get Zers is that they value self-care far more than previous generations did. We can debate whether this is due to privilege or something else, but I'm hoping this is a shift in mindset that sticks around for a while. I recommend we all take a cue from them and take a step back.
We've had a year of lockdown, some of us in relative (or total) isolation. What did we miss the most? What did we learn about ourselves? It's hard to go through such an experience without learning some surprising things. Maybe we've learned that we can endure way more than we thought we could. Maybe we learned that we don't really need to go to the store so often. Maybe we realized that all that stuff we had at home didn't make up for missing friends and family. Maybe we learned somethings about ourselves that we didn't like so much - whatever we learned, we can value it because it can inform what comes next. Our values and our learnings can link up and we can ask what we want our new and ever-shifting normal to be.
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