What’s normal?

Quote of the day:

. . .  I asked them whether that experience, and then being in Christchurch when it disintegrated had led them to a permanent sense of impermanence, that normality is fragile.

They disagreed with the premise of the question. Instead, they believe that no one should assume a  ‘normality’. The world will always shift unexpectedly so one should just look forward, determined to make the best of whatever circumstances throw up. . .  Stephen Franks

Most of us are comfortable with the familiar, the certain and the normal. But life has a way of testing us with the uncomfortable, unfamiliar and abnormal.

Each of us has a different way of dealing with that and it’s usually not what happens to us but how we deal with it that determines our happiness and possibly survival.

In the words of Victor Frankl:

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. 

And:

Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

And

When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.

Some of us, through accident of birth and circumstance, are better able to cope with the hurdles which disrupt normal life.

But that doesn’t alter the premise that life is neither certain nor fair and for most of us, it’s not what we’re given but what we do with it that makes the difference.