NORMAL

How many times have you said in the past few months, I can’t wait until we get back to normal? I hear that phrase uttered every day as an attempt to explain our frustration with the thought of losing something we had. I get it. I want things to return to normal as much as anybody. Well, that’s not entirely true, I only want things to return that I liked. Things that I enjoyed, not hard or inconvenient stuff. Moreover, I want things to stay the way they are in quarantine.  Well, only the parts that include comfort and time with the family. Ultimately, we want to walk through life like we are in line at a Chipotle. We are quietly saying the words, I will have a little of that, some of those, medium spice, no tortilla, and a bag of chips to go, please.

Here’s the hard truth, change is good. Even when it’s painful it is good. Difficult times highlight the need for transformation in a way that is almost alarming. 2020 has proven to be a historic year filled with gut-wrenching and much needed but painful self-examination. The reality is that most of us thought we were in control six months ago. It’s like buying a home in Orange County in 1965 for $50,000 and having it appraised for $1,000,000 forty-five years later and calling yourself a genius. If you were a genius, you would have bought two. Most of us have been blessed to make some good decisions that have made us look way smarter than we actually are. We simply happened to be in the right place at the right time. 

As your Chief Encouragement Officer, it is my sacred duty to proclaim that you are at the right place at the right time today! Today may look more daunting than you would have imagined but it’s the perfect time for you to be alive. Forty-five years from today your older self will look back and say wow what an incredible change agent 2020 really was. We needed 2020 to shake off the scales of unwarranted pride and course correct our passionate pursuit of normal.

Think about it, as a nation we are dealing with the effects of a global pandemic, 30 million people out of work, the stock market behaving like a cork in the ocean, no school, no sports, Olympics canceled and we have seen racial injustice put correctly right to the front of the line in conversation. We are being forced to deal with 100 years of challenges in a six-month time frame. It reminds me of a semester summer school class that is crammed into the month of July. What does all this opportunity for change mean? 

It means that we are not returning to normal. I for one, say good! Normal has never produced anything of value. It feels like life just offered us a mulligan. You may have hit your golf ball out of bounds for the past 30 years but 2020 is standing there with a new ball in hand and offering you the opportunity to tee it up again. So here we are given a fresh scorecard with a new outlook for the future. Let’s bond together and make sure we don’t return to normal. Change is needed, change was needed, and as soon as we feel like we have got it down again be prepared for more change.