Looking for normal

"Dad, wait up. Dad wait up. I am slower than you,” I heard the young boy call as his father passed me in the airport.

The boy, around eight I would guess, trailed about 10 feet behind his dad, pulling along his own colourful “carry on” as they rushed towards the end of the long corridor.

The father slowed a little, but only a little, and smiled back at his son as the boy rushed to catch up. “You can do it,” he said warmly.

"You’re bigger than me and go faster,” the boy said. “But I bet I could go faster if I had a snack. I’m really hungry.”

Still smiling, the father nodded wisely and said “I think we should be able to look after that. Just as soon as we get to the other gate. We’ll have a nice snack there and we can both get stronger.” The son nodded acceptingly and with that they both headed off again in their rush to get to wherever they were going.

I watched them with pleasure, “watching normal”, I like to say: just an everyday interaction between parent and child. No fuss, no fighting, two people connected and moving through their life together.

I like to “watch normal”. It reminds me sometimes that all family life is not filled with conflict and pain “or at least not all the time, for who knows what the other moments of their lives are like. Perhaps this was just an interlude, but I like to think not.

Watching normal also reminds me that my work experience of everyday life is just that, my work experience.

It also reminds me that everyday life is made up of moments like this – brief meaningful exchanges between people growing however they are growing while going wherever they are going, Little moments. Daily life events. And that every life, regardless of how much pain we might see in it, is also filled with the everyday. So, it helps me to remember to “look for normal” in the everyday life of the people with whom we work – look for the “exceptions” some might say. Some days I wonder if it is not the pain we see which is the exception and we get so focused on that, that we miss the everyday.

Perhaps I need to learn to look more closely. Or perhaps I need to look less closely, see the whole instead of only the problems.

Thom