Redefining “Normal”
We talk about “normal” like it’s a fixed address — a place we can always find our way back to. But normal has never been a destination. It’s a snapshot, taken at a particular moment, of whatever pattern had been repeating long enough that we stopped noticing it as a choice.
It was once normal to drive without a seatbelt. Normal to smoke a cigarette on an airplane. Normal, for generations, to accept conditions we would now call unjust without a second thought. None of that was “true” in any permanent sense. It was just familiar. And familiarity has a way of disguising itself as truth.
I bring this up because I think a lot of us — especially those of us past 55 — are quietly wrestling with the gap between the normal we grew up with and the normal we’re actually living in now. Our bodies don’t move the way they used to. Our routines got interrupted by something: a diagnosis, a loss, a retirement, a year that changed everything. And in that interruption, something got revealed.
That’s the second thing worth naming: disruption doesn’t just interrupt normal — it exposes it. A health scare doesn’t just derail your week. It shows you that the way you’d been living — the sleep you were skipping, the movement you weren’t doing, the unhealthy foods you keep consuming, the isolation you’d quietly accepted — was never actually working. It was just familiar enough that you’d stopped questioning it. The crisis isn’t the enemy here. It’s the flashlight. The proverbial “wake up call.”
Get Mark Lampkin’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
So, what do you do with what gets revealed? This is where most people get stuck, because they assume a “new normal” is something you find — that if you just wait long enough, or read the right book, or have the right conversation, it will arrive and settle into place the way the old one did. It won’t. A new normal isn’t found. It’s built — one deposit at a time. It’s built from seeing the truth and then making necessary adjustments. Mentally. Emotionally. Physically.
I use this idea a lot in my own life: think of your daily choices as deposits into a health vault. No single walk, no single well-cooked meal, no single early bedtime changes your life. But your old normal wasn’t built in a day either — it was built the same way, one repeated choice at a time, until it stopped feeling like a choice at all. The new normal gets built the same way. Which means it’s going to feel effortful and unnatural for a while. That discomfort isn’t a sign you’re doing it wrong. It’s a sign the old normal is still the stronger habit — for now. Not buying processed foods, baking meats instead of frying with white flour, and consuming the many foods that are high in sugars…has not been easy, but it has made a significant improvement for me.
And here’s the last piece, the one I think we skip too often: normal was never just a personal decision. It’s a social agreement. Families have a normal. Professions have a normal. Neighborhoods have a normal. When I think about the officiating community I’ve spent thirty years in, or my family that now must navigate forward without the Matriarch, Michele, I know that what we now consider “standard” or “expected” was decided together, often without anyone formally deciding anything — just enough people agreeing, quietly, to move in a new direction. When death visits a family, everything changes from what you “normally” did together to a new arrangement where others are now required to keep traditions and memories alive for future generations.
That means the new normal you’re building in your own life doesn’t have to stay private. The habits you’re forming, the standards you’re raising for yourself — they’re contagious in the best sense. Somebody is watching how you’re living at 50, 60, 70. Somebody is deciding what’s normal for their own future based on what they see modeled in yours. They want to know that they, too, can create a new and improved “normal.”
Normal was never fixed. It was always a choice — made quietly, repeated often, and eventually agreed upon by the people around us. The only real question is whether we’re building the next one on purpose or just waiting to see what we default back into.
By the way — it is NOT normal for the President of the United States to be a convicted rapist. It is NOT normal for hundreds of people living on the streets in American cities. It is NOT normal to glorify men who exploit workers and achieve Billionaire status. Just to name a few.
