This is at least a month old. I have a pattern of holding off posting. I hope it indicates thoughtful reflection and not procrastination coming from uncertainty. But there is a lot of that available, and probably more to come.

I’ve been thinking about people a lot the last two years. Life, health, community, food, places to live, our impact on each other and our world.

I think of health workers who told me in 2020 that the pandemic would likely run 2 years, maybe more. I think of retail drivers who asked about my experience with customer expectations over supply patterns. The question came last year and still applies. Or teachers who came through when I was at cash. They were stressed and appreciated me understanding the difficult dynamics of balancing safety and frustration in day to day interactions. Family, friends, customers, coworkers at times butting heads over our different perspectives and experiences of life shifts across the miles, locally and beyond. At times comforting, at times arguing our beliefs and expectations about how the world works. Learning more than we knew about our neighbours, towns and cities, regions, provinces, nations and countries.

Questioning.

It’s been an interesting few years. I read and talked to people about my thoughts and questions, realized we impact each other more deeply through personal choices than I’d realized. I’m still doing that, still wondering what we think of as normal.

Years ago, I’d tell people, “normal is just the fat part of the graph.” I instinctively knew, even then, normal was not shared reality. It has elements of sharing. I work and shop in the same place my customers do. Whether our buying power measures evenly or skewed in my or your favour impacts what we think of as normal in that shared space. It impacts our perceived roles, our beliefs about each each other and ourselves, our rights regarding our selves, our families, our friends and neighbours; the lady (assuming it’s a lady), or maybe it’s a kid, your kid, a fellow student who bags your groceries, serves your coffee, cleans your floors, guards the crosswalk, drives your kids to school. Low pay, part-time, retiree, starting out, stay-at-home mom, volunteer jobs we all – because we think, “we all” – even when we see the contrasts around us every day. I’d like to hope we did spend time the past three years thinking at least a little ‘outside the box’ of day to day. I hope we think without running too quickly back to normal, too quickly pulling the blind down on what others experienced, are still experiencing.

Pulling the blind down was a game my sister and I played as kids. Not a great game or necessarily nice one. Just one way of saying go away, I’m ignoring you, not now, later maybe. Me and my time, activity, opinion, property are mine and I am ignoring you. I wrote that perspective as a poem while in university; discouraged by fear and selfish acts. Not a great poem, perhaps, but good thought expressed in reverse. A question I asked to shape my life. Imperfect results, but still ask myself.

For who and what do I give ip my seat? Does it help or harm? Do I know how to tell?

I’m asking those questions again, knowing years of questions till that soil. They form and shape me even now. Places I’ve been, the journey I took, the family I have, those I have lost, houses and homes, work life and leisure. The balance and tilt, through my own actions and other’s. Take the wide way or narrow.

Do I write? For myself? Friends? Family? To paper or blog, anthology? Literary? Opinion? A thought or a book? Essay or email?

Notes I gather list websites for reference, pondering on actions governments take, reasons or logic, and how, like pandemic lessons I’ve learned, decisions impact in ripples beyond what they say.

Like homes in the greenbelt and roadways we need. Do we know what we need? Things become out of reach.

I don’t have the answers, just questions so far. If we this, if we that, what that will come from our choice? Is it even or fair, does it balance or tilt? Will the increase in homes help the poor and displaced, or add to their rank? Will the taking and giving of lands in this way, honour the treaties, peoples and past we’re just learning about, and our place in that role.

I don’t know. I don’t know how to see where we are on the journey. I don’t know how to tell ifchoices serve us all well. I enjoy driving backroads, more moderate pace. I enjoy driving highways if I’ve a long way to go.

The people, the pace; ‘new normal’ they say, as if words can rebalance. But this isn’t that, now isn’t then, and looking forward I see snapshots of past, hovering on the brink, like questions pausing asking me to see. There was a lot of hope in my past for things my children may never see. I hear it in their words. Not just my children, but others, seeing it too. Will they have families and homes of their own. I don’t know. I can’t answer that question the same way as twenty years ago. I think how smug I was when young, knowing we were poor but could still find a way to a basic home, a decent job, a family. I didn’t realize how much of that was those around me, ones who went before, the stability they had and handed down.

We will figure it out. Societies do. But what it will be and how it will look, someone else will draw that graph and label the fat part something they call normal. That doesn’t make it normal now. Day by day, work, home, work, stay. Repetition, the tick of the clock. Without others, without society, all that’s left is the pattern, the tick, tick, tick.

Opportunity is danger packaged in choices. What will I do with them? Whatever it is, that’s what is shared, whether or not I take care. What do I chase?