This is not normal

Posting this as a reminder that you can have normal days in profoundly not normal times. It's part of the delightful contradictions that make us human 🤪

Photo by Sarah Kilian on Unsplash

It’s Saturday evening, and I am winding down from a lovely day hiking in the woods, brunch, a nap, getting the house ready for a concert we’re hosting next week, an Epsom salts bubble bath, and enjoying having the house to myself while my husband and daughter are off on their respective adventures. All around a great Saturday, and it feels great in my body.

And: the state of the world, and the new domestic and international regime we live in, was never far from my mind today — while talking with friends during our hike and over brunch, or catching up with friends over socials who are having to lay off THOUSANDS of staff and contractors in the humanitarian sector; or thinking about the impacts to an event in the UK that I am co-hosting in April because my trans colleague is no longer safe to travel, for fear of what might happen to him at the border on his return to the States with the X gender marker in his passport; to consuming a bunch of European media sources to see how the shameful treatment of Zelensky is playing on the other side of the Atlantic. Luckily, Europe is lining up behind what’s right. Phew.

Reflecting on how I am meeting this moment, I feel lucky that I invested in some personal work with the awesome team at Downshift last fall, and entered the year with renewed clarity about my purpose and how to express it in the world, plus some awesome tools for staying above the line, achieving and maintaining alignment, and sitting with uncertainty.

I am also lucky that in my “Library of Unread Books” is a partially read book by Jane McGonigal, Imaginable , which invites you to imagine scary future scenarios—the death of loved ones, losing your home, your own death, and so on as a way to train your brain to be ready when the eventuality happens. It’s not for everyone, and I know that in some cultures it’s considered taboo to contemplate horrible circumstances for fear of angering the spirits and inviting the calamity into your life. And: having imagined Trump’s second term in some detail in the 4 years prior to his re-election I find myself much less shocked and more ready to pendulate back to a level of calm in my central nervous system that creates the foundation for thoughtful next actions.

Finally, I spent 5 formative years in boarding schools that incorporated extreme levels of responsibility for us teens. The slogan of my German boarding school was “plus est en vous”, which translates to “there is more in you”, with the than you think implied. And the international school in Canada that I attended took it to a whole other level with making us a Coast Guard substation and putting as in some seriously scary first responder moments on that wild Pacific coast. When I was 17. Turns out experiential learning is a good thing when faced with authoritarian regimes, a realization that I first had when meeting an alumnus in Salem in the mid 1980s who was looking at the memorial to all the alumni who had been executed for having been part of the plot to assassinate Hitler.

As a result of all this I am having a much easier time navigating this weird new world we find ourselves in than many of my friends. Not sure where this peculiar mix of experiences will take me as the resistance to the Trump regime becomes ever more necessary, but I know one thing: I have very low tolerance for newsletters, LinkedIn postings, and small talk that carries on as if we were living in the before times. We are not. This is not a normal spring where we look forward to the reawakening of Nature and the birth of new possibilities. The United States gave birth to a new regime that, love it or hate it,¹ is impacting people’s lives in ways I don’t think most people imagined or are particularly well equipped to navigate.

While you can’t reprogram your formative years, there are things you can do in this weird time: