What if This Was Just Normal?

When I was younger I had a sense that everything in life would continuously improve. I thought that life was just a consistent line that moved up and to the right on the graph.

More years of living have taught me otherwise.

A minor, disruptive health issue, Covid, and a divorce all threw a wrench in my original hopeful philosophy.

I used to say that everyone has good days and bad days.

It's normal! It doesn't mean that anything has gone wrong.

I can now extend this idea into everyone has good years, where life is more about building and progressing, and hard years, where life is about enduring and surviving. Sometimes many of a certain kind of year are clumped together.

This idea of ups and downs extends beyond our personal lives and into our communal lives as well.

I recently saw a documentary on civic engagement that's now out on Netflix, Join or Die!, which is based on the work of Robert Putnam, who wrote Bowling Alone. The film initially presents data demonstrating that civic engagement has been steadily decreasing, along with some compelling consequences of this decrease.

But then the researchers zoom out the timeline on the data. It turns out civic engagement went through a significant increase from the nineteen thirties until about the seventies and then began declining.

The overall framing was that something was going wrong. Civic engagement should not ever decrease.

But who said that any part of life is going to be an ever increasing, straight line up and to the right? Systems oscillate. Maybe nothing has gone wrong with civic engagement. Maybe the system is just doing what systems do, going up and down over time.

My sense is that the best we can hope for is for our overall oscillations to occur in a better range, to move up the graph.

We're oscillating as a country right now, and hopefully we'll learn something from it.

Maybe the next time you hit a personal hard time you are more resourced or have a better perspective on it.

Or maybe as a culture we learn to promote the value of civic participation so that more of it occurs even as it oscillates over time.

As individuals and as a collective we are learning and doing the best that we can to navigate all the ups and downs this life entails.

And that's totally normal.