What's Normal?

Normal is relative. It is relative to one's surroundings at any given moment and normal is relative within any person during the course of their lives. There are times when everyone is crazy and there are times when most people are sane. For instance, when a loved one or a friend dies there is an element of insanity to everyone's life at that point. But some people who are dependent personalities make a career of this insanity. I prefer to call this unsanity because to me, unsanity is usually temporary like watching a friend's head be blown off on a battlefield or witnessing the death of a loved one or just having a loved one die and to try to go on without them.

9-11-2001 made most people temporarily insane for a while worldwide and people all over were confused a lot. In fact, it could be said that a world group temporary insanity came over the world in a Post traumatic stress disorder kind of way that really hasn't completely left yet.

Another example if this kind of world post traumatic stress disorder was when President Kennedy was shot, then Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Most everyone thought the U.S. government was behind these assasinations so a whole generation of young people rebeled against the government and against the Viet Nam War because they thought our government after Kennedy was completely insane!

So, what's normal? Not the times we live in now! I'm 62. If I go back to when I was born there really have not been any completely sane times since I was born. The closest to sanity the world got was when the Berlin Wall collapsed along with the Iron Curtain and then President Clinton was elected. He was enough like JFK to bring a "New Camelot" kind of feeling that put people at ease during those times. Though he was a ladies man he also balanced the budget and was one of the most intelligent and pragmatic presidents we have ever seen. Thank God he wasn't assassinated like JFK was.

So when 9-11 happened the contrast between the 90s and 9-11 was just so extreme it just threw the whole world into a severe post traumatic stress disorder and shock.

In my own personal life the sanest part of my life has been since December 1994. Even though I almost died for 7 months in 1998 and 9 my life has been relatively sane since then. There has been enough money and solid relationships in my life to carry me through almost anything. I have been very lucky and I am very grateful.

However, the rest of my life wasn't like that.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s people in college were lucky then to just be able to appear to be normal even when the world and their lives were so churned up that they often were one step away from suicide on any given moment. Maybe 17 to 25 is still like that. I don't know. I'm not there anymore. Thank God!

Some people tell me they wish they were young again. I say to them, "Do you actually remember just how difficult all that was? Or are you just living in a fantasy?"

Even though I had many many girlfriends and friends and amazing experiences between ages 15 and 25, I look back on the late 60s and early 70s as a sort of group mass insanity that I was privileged enough to survive when many I knew didn't. It wasn't that there weren't amazing amazing experiences back then. It was just so difficult to watch so many friends and acquaintances die or go crazy or both in horrible ways. Just watching what happened to people was enough to give everyone pause.

So the present insanity of the world we now live in reminds me the most of the dynamics world wide of the early 1980s and the 1930s. It's like those dynamics and new ones have created the present world version of insanity we presently live in.

However, not being young anymore I have something that young people don't have: perspective. This gives me the advantage of saying to younger people: "If you don't give up you will survive all this!" That really is the quality that gets people through to something better in their lives. No matter how knocked down you feel you need to let it all go each night when you go to sleep so you can wake up someone new each morning and give it another try. If you give up it's over, your whole life is over. You can give up each night as long as you try again tomorrow. So, give up when you go to sleep so you can be renewed in the morning at the new dawn. There is always hope if you don't permanently give up. If you permanently give up your life is over. But if you give up at night to God or to Life when you go to sleep you have a chance of waking up a new person in the morning fresh as a daisy to try once again. So don't give up. Normal is relative to every moment in life. Don't give up! Have hope! I did and now I have a really great life at 62. You can too!