The new normal? I honestly don’t think there will be anything new about our reality after covid, but instead more of a transition backwards to what was once considered normal. I own a farm, grow my own food, raise, slaughter, and butcher my own animals. My children know intimately the circle of life and our food systems. We hide nothing from them. Our normal, is an old normal. The normal of past generations long gone and honestly tragically forgotten.
In a world where globalization is paramount, where you can have pretty much anything at the touch of a button or a swipe of a card we have forgotten where our food, our cloths, our basic necessities come from. I would actually take that even further to say not only have we forgotten but we have lost the knowledge of these systems.
I often get asked, “how do you know how to do all that,” which is always followed by “I could never do it.” My answer is always simple, “trial and error,” and “yes you can, you just have to make it your new normal.”
Covid-19 has rattled our modern cookie cutter society’s scenes of “normal” to the core. But I ask you was it really normal to buy processed meat, packaged in tons of plastic from a grocery store? Never knowing what that animal looked like sounded like, how it lives, reproduces, and how it died? Is it normal to buy vegetables that are our of season from the store that are three times the size of normal vegetables without an imperfection on them? Is it normal to have clothing made by no-name children in Bangladesh while your children of the same age spend their days playing computerized games about nature on tablets?
We were living a “normal” life that was anything but normal. Covid-19 is our wake up call to pay attention, to do better, to be better, to go back to normal.
