A New Normal — Dr. Hallowell's Vision for Post-Pandemic Life
By Ned Hallowell, M.D.
I wonder if we can ever feel normal again after the trauma of the pandemic. People often talk about “when life gets back to normal,” or “when things go back to the way they used to be”. After 500,000 deaths and counting, it’s hard to imagine a return to life as we knew it before COVID 19.
Looking back to October of 1918, 200,000 Americans died in that one month alone of what was misleadingly called the “Spanish flu”. Before that pandemic was done, some 550,000 of our United States forebears perished. Around the world the total dead reached over 50,000,000.
Did we return to normal back then? Or did the idea of normal simply change? Traumatized, did the nation start to live in fear, or did the end of World War I instill some hope?
My crystal ball is a faulty as anyone’s, but my guess is that the political/social schisms in our country will be more difficult to heal and continue to hurt us longer than the ravages of the pandemic. The pandemic, paradoxically enough, united us against a common enemy, a virulent microbe. But the Red vs. Blue division has pitted us against one another, often viciously, and sometimes violently. We have no vaccine for that, nor any microbe to blame.
As we grieve the people who’ve died from the virus; as we help our children make up for what they’ve lost in school; as we try to build back up the many businesses that faltered or failed in the past year, I hope and pray, when we are able to remove our masks and come closer together physically, that we will learn maybe the most important lesson COVID could have taught us: how much we missed each other.
That’s the “normal” I want the most. The normal of mutual regard, the normal of community, the normal of respecting the dignity of every human being. Perhaps that’s a normal we’ve never really known. But it is the normal I hope and pray we all will start aiming for and doing every little deed we can to bring into our world. A normal that protects us all from each other, a normal that urges us to keep in mind we do not have all the answers, a normal that reminds us, when we feel cocksure of anything, that there was a time when the smartest and most learned people in the world “knew” that the world was flat.
Let us create a normal where being kind takes precedence over being right; where listening takes precedence over pushing your own point of view; where learning how to forgive takes precedence over demanding revenge.
As we develop immunity to COVID 19 virus and its variants, I hope and pray we can also develop immunity to the virus of virulent division that threatens to kill what should be the everyday pleasures and small joys we all should be able to enjoy before the day comes when we can enjoy no more.
Shakespeare urged that we love that well which we must leave ere long. For those of us who’ve survived the pandemic, who’ve been lucky enough not to be plucked from this world as yet, I hope and pray we will now go at life with renewed purpose not just to stay safe and virus-free, but that we extend beyond our familiar zone and into the zone of making peace with those we disagree with, suspending judgment in favor of forbearance, and reconstructing the bridges that we’ve burned.
The normal I yearn for is the normal that I believe we all yearn for: a normal of life low on fear and high on trust; a normal that puts humor and humility before self-righteous trumpeting; and a normal that can at last heave a huge sigh of relief, and say, “Isn’t it great to be getting along again?”
Dr. Edward Hallowell is a world-renowned authority on ADHD and co-founder of the Hallowell Todaro ADHD Centers. We provide ADHD support services centered around his “strength-based” approach.