The New Ordinary
A while back I bought a little book called ‘Zen, The Art of Simple Living*’. This almost dystopian existence we are currently enduring seemed a good time to pull it out of the bookshelf, and revisit some of the wisdom on its pages.
Many people have talked about ‘the new normal’ during this enduring crisis. A lot of it is focussed on the future world and what that will look like. This is really difficult to plan for at present, especially when so much work is still underway furloughing staff, arranging loans and just working out how to survive right now. A lot of people are in that boat, and people like me are doing as much as we can to help them. Right now, it looks like a real mess, and until we are quite a way further along the road, it is going to be difficult to plan for that new normal.
This morning I turned the page to find a profound pronouncement in my little book;
“Be grateful for every day, even the most ordinary.”
How many people are longing, praying even, for an ‘ordinary’ day? The author talks about the order of life in respect of death, and how, when someone predeceases us, it is perhaps the most upsetting and unsettling. If everyone passes in the sequence of age, in the natural order, the monk professes this will provide the greatest happiness.
And that is what makes ‘ordinary’ so very special. Breathing, eating, sleeping. Ordinary is the new remarkable. The disruption that has been thrust upon us has given us what is hopefully a once in a lifetime opportunity to re-assess our normal. Some of us will lose loved ones out of the natural sequence. Others will have no jobs to go to. Few will return to a world which just looks precisely the same as it did prior to this.
It’s with these thoughts, that I’d invite you to reconsider what is going to be your ‘new ordinary’ as opposed to your ‘new normal’? the latter is somewhat imposed on us, dependent on the developing strategies of our governments and large corporations. But we have much more say in our ‘ordinary’. It is what we personally willing to set as our boundaries, and our aspirations.
Like many others, my own business has slowed down, and because I can, I’m doing more for free just to help people through and be sure I have some clients on the other side of this! And in that lull, I’ve discovered more. I am reading more. I’m finding joy and delight in the most ordinary of things. Starting with the very simplest of life’s components – breathing, sleeping and eating, I’m rebuilding a more content normality in my life. A chap I used to work with in armed policing of all things once gave me a great piece of wisdom;
“Every morning, when you wake up, and open your eyes, say one thing out loud;
‘I’m back!”
There are so many opportunities to be seized as a result of this disturbance in the force. For the most enlightened, the greatest ones will be the personal ones.
Derek Flint Cert. Ed., MCIPR
*‘Zen. The Art of Simple Living’, by Shunmyo Masuno. Penguin Random House, 2019