The Great Loss of Normal

Cityscapes so foreign,
rise and fall against the horizon,
like an alien heartbeat.



Being a stranger once makes you a stranger forever.
I once thought that I had only to get used to a place to understand that the way of life in that place was not strange. But I fear I will never again be used to a place, having been displaced once. I cannot take anything for granted. Seeing new ways of preparing vegetables does not make the new way seem "normal." It banishes "normal" forever. No new way of preparing vegetables will ever seem stranger than the first way I learned to prepare vegetables.


Things are moving forward. This school year is ending. And I have struggled through it, here in this old Pennsylvania city, where everything was new. As a slow-adjuster, I can even look at old things and see new things. This could be an endless source of anxiety for me, if I were not careful. And as we all know, I get overwhelmed with new situations and all their new expectations, and new shapes of door handles and placements of light switches, and new faces, and new languages. As all the new builds up, so could the anxiety: you simply cannot study all those things at once.

Perhaps, when I am old, I will sit near the window, and watch the world. I will watch closely. I will feel things slowly. I will grasp the dresser handle, and let it become the very definition of a handle. I will turn off the lights, and finally think long. I will have time there, in that quiet place, to let the walls fall away, blacked out, whited out, then rebuilt into reality. And I will reclaim normal from the slowness.

But no, that's wrong. Life does not slow down to a snail's pace as we age. It speeds up. All I will have time for will be to think long about the dustiness of the windowsill. Then it will be bedtime, and I'll have to lay me down for the fatigue of that long thinking. And maybe I'll remember how, long ago, when I was perhaps just in high school, normal left forever. Who knows when it fell away? When did the floorboards rock and splinter, and finally give way?

C.S. Lewis said, in Surprised by Joy, "it was all sea and islands now, the great continent had sunk like Atlantis." He was speaking of the death of his mother. I suppose my great loss of normal must either be my brother leaving, or my mother remarrying, or going abroad for six months. Whenever it was, whatever shook my normal, I'm grateful. In place of the normal, I can have anxiety about the new, or faith in the God of all. To Him, we are not strangers.