Normal

Sitting eating dinner with a local friend of mine tonight, I realized normal is a word that has greatly changed in meaning for me over the last couple of years, in great and small ways. The restaurant I was eating in sits next door to the home of a former warlord who is now a minister in the national government, during dinner he left in convoy with a large armed escort of possibly twenty men, in my life today, completely normal. Seeing men with automatic weapons on a daily basis is completely normal. Not being able to remember the name of the food I am eating, normal. Mixing two or three languages into a single sentence, normal. What is usual, typical or expected in my life has completely changed. I struggle at times wondering how far to let my mind except these changes. I want my eyes to always see the extraordinary, but my mind copes with the pain entangled with truly seeing. I want always to have the ability to remain comfortable, even outside my comfort zone, but how do I remain comfortable in a world that is slowly tearing itself to pieces. I find myself wrestling with the world in which I live. I need, normality and comfort, but it cannot be at the expense of desensitizing myself to the world. True hope can only exist if I see the world as it is, along side what it could be. However, seeing the world as it is means accepting that the pain and suffering in it is an intimate emotion.
Normal for the majority of my life meant certain food, familiar scenery, access to advanced technology in almost every realm of life, sanitation as a standard, traveling without jet lag, long time friendships in close contact, comfort and safety. Now, nearing the ripe old age of a quarter century none of these are normal in my life. I ask myself the question how many of my mindsets should change? What constitutes compromise and what contentment? Wisdom is having experience, knowledge and good judgment, the quality of being wise. I desire for my entire to life to lead to wisdom, applying the experience and knowledge I have gained in a healthy way, but experience and knowledge can also lead cynicism if unbalanced. I want to be worldly wise with heavenly compassion. I want the usual, typical and expected to be the unnatural, to live supernaturally. Life is a contradiction, one whose facets I must strive to see resolved.
Just over a year ago I struggled with were to find hope, now I struggle with how to see it realized. I find that it is with this friction that the cutting pain of this world can be mellowed and the dullness of the tools we use to see it can be honed. Just as a rubber band is useless when slack, one tensioned holds the power to move great distances, or hold together great numbers, but if pulled to far will break, repairable, although scarred. It is the tension of the moon and earth that creates the beauty of crashing waves, the tension of light through prisms that creates rainbows, the tension of emotion that creates excitement. Living in the tension of normal and extreme I can feel the slightest movements in the things tensioned with me, but the balance of keeping them from breaking, is one of intricate trust in a hope that must be true.