Have you ever found yourself in an uncomfortable situation? Or around someone you don’t want to be around? Or, perhaps, talking about something you would just as soon never come up in conversation?
We’ve all been there, and sometimes too often. It’s our discomfort zone. You don’t know how to respond nor act, and you want to return to something normal. It’s like slipping on a pair of shoes already worn to fit your feet—no squeeze, stiff material, or something that requires a tool to put them on your tired little doggies.
It’s slipping into something like normal.
When life is uncomfortable, I slip into my mind and live a few moments of a more pleasant experience. Escapism? Maybe. But we all need something that helps us endure the uncomfortable.
Get a shot? Most of us look away and think about something else. Hmmm. The taste of a good cup of coffee! You can almost smell it roasting, then freshly opened, and finally brewed to perfection. Hmmm… Good to the last drop! Oh, the doctor is done. Let’s find a coffee shop!
Abnormal Living
During these past 20+ months, life has been abnormal. If you know me, then you know what I’m talking about. Add the present season of a pandemic, the tenseness of life on many street corners, and everything feels sub-par. Not normal. You make do with what life is and strive to make it through, but your energy level is tapped out. No one can make it perk up. How do you leave abnormal in the rear-view mirror? You must take charge of your own well-being and care for yourself.
That’s when you need something more like “normal” to slip into. Guiltless normal.
Through this season, many have lost family members and not been there to say goodbye. Isolation has been a real bummer, especially when we don’t know how to handle it. Our modern world has been all about connectivity. Add the financial burden, uncomfortable work, and school situations, and the fear of a cough or fever, suddenly, everything we once accepted as normal is no longer that – it’s abnormal.
Looking through the daisy-chained emails and files from 2019, I relived a horrible event that has not healed, nor may never, even though closure may be on the horizon. Then cancer, and another death. Then the pandemic and its weighty concerns. Will it ever return to normal. That’s impossible. I may have to find a new normal. Alaska, anyone?
I’m ready for abnormal to be gone! Presto!
Abnormal? Begone!
Through my years of reading and studying, I have found how others survived the abnormal. It’s good preparing for the journey through the jungle. You cannot do it by yourself. There must be others ready to step past the barrier and join you on the new journey. I cannot bring back the times of yesteryear, but I can be like a new mother with a nesting instinct. Let’s make life as we know it normal, and accept that it will be different.
Chatting with someone last week, I realized that life is not lived backward. It’s forward motion. Lay aside the weight of what you’ve been through (paraphrasing Hebrews 12:1), and let’s head forward without being drugged by the past.
Click on this link and read about Horatio Spafford and find out how he went through a horrible experience but then survived and penned the words to a beautiful song, It Is Well… If he can do it. I can do it. Abnormal? Begone!