When Will Life Get Back To Normal From Covid-19

When Will Life Return to Normal From COVID-19

It’s the million-dollar question in times of radical change. Will life ever go back to normal? Will the sunshine like it once did?

Will these moments that seemed so ordinary, that we took for granted, ever be experienced? These simple things, like enjoying a glass of wine at a cafe terrace in the city center surrounded by friends, or enjoying a sunny day in the park with the family? Or how about hugs, and kisses on the cheeks? Or a firm handshake with an old friend?

It’s striking how memories of times not so long ago can change into fragments of an odd and distant world. Another era, so it seems, that was much brighter, much more beautiful, much more lively, and no so drenched in fear and diseased by insecurity.

Something that seemed so dark at times. But we only realize the beauty of it now it’s gone. So, I tell myself: How on earth could you’ve have been so unappreciative of the freedom we had back then?

And how on earth could you’ve been so ignorant of the fact that our liberties are not a matter of course? And how could you have predicted that our lives would be able to change so drastically within the snap of a finger?

When Will Life Return to Normal?

Well, the normal we perceive as normal is already passed. So what did you do when life was ‘still normal’? Many lived for what was yet to come. And many wasted their time on past resentments too.

When life was still normal the moment was never good enough. So it took the transformative force of a crisis for you to cherish what you once had, but never esteemed. And this is how it’s always been, with most of us.

We long for moments that are gone and never come back, to no avail. When life was still normal, did we never desire for those good old times? Did we never think back to the world when it was still beautiful?

And when we didn’t long for the past, we hoped for the future; that all our plans would ‘work out’, that we’d achieve that beach body at six percent body fat, that we’d someday land the ‘perfect love’, and that we’d finally see those seven digits in our bank accounts.

It’s ironic that when times are ‘normal’ we want ‘change’. And when there’s ‘change’ we want ‘normal’. So perhaps we don’t want ‘normal’. Perhaps, what we want, is ‘change’, because ‘normal’ seems to never satisfy.

Will life ever go back to normal? 

The answer is twofold. We’re in a time of radical change, and the more radical the change is, the further we’ll be removed from what once was. Life will never be the same again.

But the good news is that life has always been changing, yet, as Marcus Aurelius pointed: history repeats itself over and over again. Change always has been. Sometimes slowly and steadily, other times quickly and radically.

Right now, life is simply changing at a faster pace. 

As Lao Tzu once wrote; 

“If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to.” The entropic nature of the universe never preserves, and always recreates.

From the old, it forms the new, without stopping, without looking back, without mercy. When we go down the stream of life we never know what we will encounter. One day we may quietly float along, another day we might tumble down a waterfall and drastically change course.

We are in that waterfall right now. And it’s unclear how deep the fall will be. But when we hit the bottom, and manage to survive the plunge, chances are that there will be quieter waters ahead of us.

From there, we can hopefully leave behind what was once normal and give the new normal the respect it deserves.