The path from new to normal is often destructive

​For an ice-breaker at a team meeting this week, our boss asked us to name the three phone apps we'd have on your phone if we were only allowed to have three.

Our choice of three didn't have to include the apps that traditionally come with your phone.

We went around the room and my colleagues named their three. Many of them explained why they'd choose those apps, often using phrases like "I could never live without that one."

I myself, when speaking about my Evernote app said, "my whole life is in that app."

When we were all finished, I made the observation that a mere four decades ago these phones and the apps that we're talking about did not exist. They were science fiction in many ways.

They sure were to me.

I mean, when I was a teen talking on the phone, the one hanging on the kitchen wall, that you had to stick your finger in small holes and dial, and everyone around listening in - NEVER EVER in my wildest imagination could I have envisioned a day when that phone would do what our phones do today.

And yet, in short order, smart phones have become such a normal part of our lives that many of us can't imagine living without them.

It is scary in some ways how the unthinkable blasts its way to complete normalcy in our lives. It's scary because once something becomes normal, it's increasingly more difficult, sometimes impossible, to see the harm that normal may be doing.

When we look back on history, I'm not sure we'll conclude that smart phones were a healthy addition. I am certain we'll conclude they were toxins to the brains of the developing child.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about.

I'm here to remind us just how easily the unthinkable can become the normal in our lives. And once it becomes the norm, it's much more difficult for us to see it as the problem.

I had a conversation with a young person the other day. They got in some trouble after drinking at a party. They expressed the kind of drinking they did that night wasn't their normal pattern of drinking. So I asked them, why did you change your pattern that night?

The student said, that's just what you do at that kind of party.

Normalcy becomes one of the loudest invitations there is, one of the most inviting temptations, to let what was once unthinkable deceptively enter our lives like a virus, suddenly intent on taking over our entire being.

When I was young, on occasion I witnessed alcohol at the center of fun, of laughter, of people having a good time. It never occurred to me that alcohol might be destructive.

But for many it is.

Normal is the great secret keeper. When your life is in shambles, it's often hard to attribute that to something you see everyone else doing as a normal part of their lives. (This is why I don't withhold one destructive story from my boys about the abnormal damage alcohol has done to my life).

Normal often hides the destruction occurring beneath the surface.

It hides the destruction beneath the buzz, beneath the scrolling, beneath the political party or religion, beneath the opinions and judgments.

Normal has a way of flying into our lives, destruction stowed away in the carry on bags.

I guess I'm just asking us to think about the things that have become normal in our lives. Maybe so normal that we don't pause and wonder, has this become such a normal part of my life, my beliefs, my choices, that I no longer even wonder if this is healthy for me?

There are many things we normally do every day that are indeed healthy for us.

But they are healthy for us because they are healthy choices, not because they are normal.

Normal is never the best predictor of healthy.