Gold at the end of the rainbow
The ‘new normal’ is all the rage at the moment and although the phrase is rapidly achieving cliché status, it does engage with the times we are in and the future we might have to expect.
When we went into lockdown, we were trying to make the best of a bad situation. As we've realised that it'll last longer than we'd ever hoped, we've had to adapt to things and find a new way of working - we couldn't operate in damage limitation mode for weeks on end.
And even as lockdown starts to ease a little in small ways, we're all wondering when we can just get back to normal. Where we have to reluctantly let go of some of the familiar, we at least want to retain some semblance of normality’.
But is there a broader, richer ambition to entertain? A way to capture something of the journey we've each been on? Something beyond the old or new normal?
Necessity being the mother of invention isn't just another cliché - we're such amazingly adaptable creatures that we rarely settle for not adapting to the challenges and demands around us. What we're not necessarily very good at is spotting that we've done it or capturing the benefits.
What from our experiences could we take into the post-Covid world so that we don't just go back to normal? So that when it arrives, we can look back and see we haven't just survived? We can hope for something better than the old normal as a result of going through the challenges and demands of the current situation.
We talk a lot at Monkton about how failure is a necessary ingredient to the learning process - whether we’re learning to be better geographers, better musicians, better rugby players or better friends. Facing our failures shows us the next steps. But it's not just failure which helps us grow; it's adversity too.
As the great Billy Graham once said, ‘Comfort and prosperity have never enriched the world as much as adversity has’ and although adversity is as discomfiting as failure when we’re in it, the riches it delivers are just as precious.
Of course there are many things in this season to legitimately lament or complain about, and none of this takes away from the suffering and genuine fear that many are experiencing. There is very much a place for that but it needn't eclipse something more hopeful - it's OK to hold both thoughts in tension.
And there have been other moments alongside the adversity - small things which we’ve been able to glimpse as a result of the hardships of lockdown - silent skies, clearer birdsong, small gestures of kindness. It would be a great shame if we missed this opportunity and ‘forget the thing that this great stopping of the world has shown us’ as Rhidian Brook put it in his Thought for the Day.
I’m not advocating utopian visions of the future but glimpses of the present that we might want to take into the future. Just as the psalmist wrote - you have to be still to see it.
The rainbow has been a remarkable universal symbol of hope through the Covid pandemic - a harking back to its biblical roots of the promise made by a faithful God. And it echoes the even bigger sweep of the biblical narrative - the despair of Eden lost, but the promised hope of an even better New Heaven and New Earth - better because of the tribulation not in spite of it.
As even now the noise begins to return, why not look at your diary and pencil in 20 minutes to sit on your own and ask yourself the question: ‘what have I noticed which I don’t want to lose?’ Write it down and own it; there may not be a crock of gold at the end of the rainbow but there could be a nugget which makes the new normal newly remarkable.
By Joe Sidders - Deputy Head Learning, Monkton Senior School
