Make Normal Great Again

M uch of the world has been living in a situation that might be called Same-Sh**-Different-Day-Plus-Masks+Sometimes, because their jobs can’t be done on a computer. But life is about to change for the white-collared. As the vaccines have rolled out, bosses are starting to contemplate a return of workforces to offices, lovebirds are sending out their delayed wedding invitations, families are planning reunions, and friends are testing each other’s willingness to go out and meet IRL.

The journalists are here to tell you that the Return to Normal after COVID is going to be psychologically taxing, neurobiolologically awkward, and socially draining. Make sure you don’t beat yourself up if you find it stressful.

I’m sure some people feel that way, but as the vaccination rates have gone up high enough to effectively end the pandemic, I want to put in a word for normal: It’s great.

Christendom always featured more feast days than fast days. And COVID-era restrictions have been the longest and most penitential time most of us will live through. So, no, let’s not wait for Joe Biden’s Fourth of July to feel safe and get together and celebrate. If you haven’t done it already, you should make plans for a Memorial Day cookout. It’s healthy for you.

If anything, COVID-era restrictions should teach us that we need even more “normality” than we had before the pandemic. Fewer Zooms, fewer screens, less time on Netflix and YouTube and social media. Our social life had been too digitized already. Socializing isn’t really “optional” for human sanity: Friends, family, co-religionists, and even the occasional enemy and rival are necessary for your well-being. Even if you are an introvert.

The digital life and COVID in particular have a tendency to put people too deep into their own heads. People dwell on and overthink the “likes” and “hearts” and timing of a digital ellipsis responding to their text messages, or the pace of responses to emails. Real relationships are conducted with the tones of our voice, with body language. With micro-expressions of disgust, pleasure. With movements of the eyes or lips that express confusion or that acknowledge the presence of sexual interest before any mind in the room could apprehend it. You know: REAL LIFE with its hazards, dangers, and thrills.

I’ve started to try to undermine the last bits of public-health theater in our lives. When my son’s preschool asks me the health questionnaire in the morning, I explain that no, I’ve not been in contact with anyone who is quarantined. But to each teacher who appears, I add, “We’re living on the other side of all this now,” and try to gauge their level of relief to be able to agree with me, or their relative disgust and fear.

The past week in my own life, I’ve seen children crying tears of joy to be allowed to sing in the schola of their own church for the first time in a year. I’ve seen those same children bouncing around on a trampoline with their friends in the tentatively reckless way that young children need to be if they are going to learn to master the movement of their bodies and drain themselves of energy before bedtime.

“No man is an island,” is the trite truism. But neither is a nuclear family a self-sustaining archipelago. Locking up in a single-family household for weeks and months at a time tends to overburden and warp familial relationships. Spouses need to be around not just their own extended family, but other peer families, or orbiting around the professional groups of their spouses. We learn and relearn to value our closest relations more as we see them through the eyes of other people. Maybe our grandparents were right to have so many dinner parties, and bridge clubs, and bowling leagues.

The pandemic is ending. Stop overstimulating your fear with screens. Make normal great again.