Tag: Be here now

I was struck by a recent Seth Godin blog post, in which he addresses something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. It’s titled A new normal and the take away message I got from it is that every moment brings its own “new normal.”

True, some are more dramatic and far-reaching than others, but we experience them repeatedly throughout our lives. At the top of my personal list of “events that turned my life upside down” are the breakup of a serious relationship in my early twenties; the death of my mother; and the stillbirth of my baby.

I think what’s adding to the current challenge is that it’s not just my life that is turned upside down — it’s everything. When it was my own unique personal tragedy, I could find comfort in the continuity and steadiness of life all around me. But nowadays it can feel like there is no continuity; that there’s nothing steady.

So of course we wish things would get back to normal! Or as Seth puts it: “We’ve got a deep-seated desire for things to go back to normal, the way we were used to.”

But I find myself thinking about how people must have coped during wartime — as in bombs falling and cities being invaded and “life as one knows it” being completely and utterly destroyed. That gives me some perspective.

In these truly unprecedented times, I’m trying to deeply accept the fact that all bets are off. The lessons we’re currently faced with used to feel optional but now they’re absolutely compulsory: Be here NOW. Appreciate the present moment. LOVE, period.

As Seth says at the end of his blog post:
“There’s simply the normal of now.
A new normal. This too shall pass.”