Entirely Normal

A college friend long ago told me she’d been trying to think of somebody normal. “Oh, Anne in fourth grade!” my friend said. “Anne was entirely normal.”

I think of that when I hear complaints, “Crazy weather! It never used to be like this.” Hot, cold, wet, dry, snowy, snowless: to hear folks talk, it’s never within the norm. Don’t get me wrong; I believe in climate change, but that's about long-term trends, not day-to-day variation. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter is set during the very real “hard winter” of 1880-81. I built gigantic snow castles one winter as a child and got stuck in an April blizzard in 1975. Which years didn’t set a record of some sort, one day or another? There’s little so normal as abnormal weather.

When my doctor says, “entirely normal,” she means “common and no cause for concern.” A statistician’s “normal” involves the distribution of probabilities along a bell-shaped curve. Often, though, labeling normal or abnormal reflects the binary thinking that evolved to help us survive. It enables snap judgments like “safe or unsafe?” when there’s no time for nuance. Most of life is more nuanced than binary. That includes weather, people, and more. Variation is entirely normal.

Image: Photo by Artem Beliaikin on Unsplash.