At one point in my career I flew to Tokyo to teach a number if times over a ten year period. I loved it. Japan was THE most different culture and society I had ever experienced at that point, and when you are somewhere so different from what you are used to, then you notice things which might otherwise have passed you by.
One morning I was in a coffee shop for breakfast and it struck me as strange that I, like pretty much everyone else in the shop, was sitting drinking my coffee alone. In fact I took this photo of a woman who was sitting on a bar stool facing a wall – I guessed that they had decorated the wall with such a lovey photo of a flower to make it more pleasing to sit there with your back to the rest of the room. I tended to seek out a seat next to a window, but it was a tiny coffee shop so there wasn’t much choice.
Now, as I look at this photo again, in the midst of this pandemic with coffee shops in France having been closed since October, it doesn’t seem so strange any more. I can imagine a new norm emerging where people choose to sit more separately than they used to. Maybe not, but it just seems that “normal” isn’t “normal” any more!
What will “normal” be like later this year, and into next year? I guess none of us know. But I do remember how odd it seemed to me that so many people went about their ordinary business in Tokyo wearing masks all the time, and I sure don’t see that as odd any more. Will that become part of our new norm? Here in France people have always had a degree of physical intimacy which was significantly beyond what I’d experienced in Scotland. The normal greeting would be to “faire la bise” – to kiss on both cheeks (for someone you knew anyway!) Well, that’s all gone. Will it return? Or will keeping a social distance become the “new normal”?
I genuinely don’t know. Part of me thinks this pandemic is changing us forever, and, after all, there is never any “going back” in life. But part of me also thinks that people will “revert to form” at the very first opportunity, and rapidly re-establish their pre-Covid habits and behaviours.
All that raises the question of what we are going to do collectively……how we are going to live together having gone through this experience. After all, a lot has become more obvious, not least how interconnected we are on this planet. The massive inequalities have become clearer. Is there political and Public will to tackle that? People who were pretty much disregarded have now been shown to be “essential workers” (which does get me wondering who the non-essential workers are……I’ll leave you to think about that one for yourself!). Will we change our priorities about Public Health and Social Care? Will we change the way we look after our elderly and vulnerable? Perhaps even more importantly will be turn against mass consumption and so called “growth” to put our efforts into tackling the big problems of climate change and loss of biodiversity which are probably at the root of the pandemic anyway?
There are plenty of reasons to hope that “normal” has changed, will change, and that we will not even attempt to hang on to the ways of living which got us into this mess in the first place.
Thank goodness “normal is not fixed”.
Heroes Not Zombies 