There’s a function in recording software called normalize.
It does some kind of magic to bring a track into a more uniform volume level, mostly by boosting what’s too quiet to bring it more in line with everything else. Sometimes it’s great. Sometimes it’s terrible. Sometimes it does nothing at all.
But it got me to thinking about what life after Covid is going to be like, and what “return to normal” actually means. I had tea out in the world with a friend yesterday, and it was amazing. I hadn’t done that in over a year, and it was a blissful return to normality, and an almost new experience at the same time. We talked and talked and talked, and I ended up getting a parking ticket, and I was like, whatever, I just had tea in the world with a friend, screw it, totally worth it!
But once I got home, i was grateful that my partner was heading out to watch his kid’s track meet so I could be alone to recharge. I had the big, and now I needed the small in order to recover from the big. After a year of mostly small, the idea of having some big everyday seems crazy daunting. And as much as I am longing to return to seeing clients and being in the sound for hours every day, I have to admit I’m a little nervous about the ratio of peopling to solitary-ing. (Yeah, I’ll turn adjectives into verbs, I’m that much of a rebel.)
There’s a shaman from Russia called Grabovoi who deals in normalization, of bringing things into normality, into balance.
He works to bring the extremes together, to create harmony. Bring down the spiky, overwhelming, uncomfortable high, and bring up the aching, hollow, deadly low, and use the energy of both to fuel what’s in the middle to make it richer. I love Grabovoi’s work, even though it’s super mathy, and it has really helped me and the people in my world heal faster, drive safer, and live gentler lives.
There are times when you want to feel all the feels — you want to love hotter and harder and wilder, or you want to grieve so hard you cry all the pain away, or you want to wallow in the pit of despair endlessly so no one will ever bother you again. But those states are not sustainable, and they’re not realistic, and once you’ve been there for a while, any other way of being feels too pale, or too light, or too much. Some people find relief with pharmaceuticals that bring their reactions into an artificial “normal,” and some people hate how that makes them feel — or not feel.
Normal is kind of a dirty word for those of us who embrace our weird.
Some capital W Weirdos believe that normal is for tiny-minded people who are afraid to be authentic and terrified of letting their uniqueness show. Some people even court extra weirdness and greater heights of strangeness and eccentricity in actual fear of being “normal.” Ugh! Who wants to blend in? Who wants to live in the status quo? Who wants to accept what is as it is when it could be so much cooler?
I’m extra super guilty of all of that. In typical teenaged blustering angst, I was willfully weird and even alienating and then got mad when people didn’t like me. Fortunately I eventually learned to turn my weirdness into uniqueness, and dropped the chip off my shoulder, too. It was a normalizing process. I tempered my teenaged anger with some humility, found some middle ground between my fear of blending in and my fear of never fitting in, and discovered that my authentic self was actually pretty likeable. And I still have miles to go on that, really. That winnowing process, the normalization between the prickly and the peaceful, is a lifetime work in progress. But it’s better now than it’s ever been.
Normal is a setting on a washer, but it’s also a formula for pulling the extremes together into a richer whole.
“I’ve been stuck in my house for a whole year with no socializing so now I’m going to do everything and see everybody and eat in every restaurant and shop at every store and …” burn yourself to a cinder? Sounds like a plan. No, we have to ease into it. And we have to have patience with each other, because my re-entry speed is gonna be different than yours. Some may be ready to fly out the door and do all the things, but I am not. I am ready to cautiously go out, masked, and do a couple things and then retreat to my cocoon to recover. Others may not even be ready for that. I am not ready to be unmasked yet, and probably won’t be for a very long time. It’s kind of nice being a little bit anonymous.
(I realized yesterday that because of the mask, I talk to myself in public now, which I had never done before. It’s more like muttering. But I used to be very intentional about keeping my thoughts internal when I was out, and now, I am muttering a lot. Oh well. It’s part of my delightful eccentricity. If I didn’t talk to myself I’d have nobody at all to talk to most of the time.)
All of this being said, this thing is far from over. It could be months, maybe even another year, some say an entire generation, before we don’t have to contend with Covid, at least part of the time. We’ll have a Covid season, just like we’ll have a flu season, for years to come. I hope that forecast is an extreme worst-case scenario. Hopefully we can normalize it with the somewhat reckless optimism many of us are feeling now, and bring it into a sustainable center. We’re going back into the world again, but normal has shifted. It’s not obliterated, nor it is new. It is just a little further along toward the side of caution, and that’s a good thing. I haven’t had a cold or a flu in over a year – halle-fekkin-lujah. I will gladly wear a mask for the rest of my life if I don’t have to do that anymore.
So here’s to normal, the equalization of extremes that fuels the richness at the gooey center of life. Meet you there for tea?
Looking for more gentleness, equilibrium and goodness at the gooey center of your life? SoundWorks can help.