By Mike Bossy

Given the pandemic, I have had a little more time on my hands. The upside of this is I have been doing a lot of thinking. What is normal? Will we get back to normal? What will normal look like?

I saw an ad on TV for the movie Call of the Wild. The movie is based on the book written by Jack London. I know I read it sometime in my early school career, likely grade seven. I had memories of the book and so I decided to read it again. This time, I was going to pay more attention and perhaps gain some life lessons or at least some insights that my teacher may have been trying to impart.

It is a story about a dog named “Buck” who is taken from his family and sold to characters of less than stellar qualities. He is sold for purposes of pulling a dog sled during the Klondike Gold Rush. Buck must cope, adapt, survive, be resilient and otherwise change in order to survive. He eventually becomes a dominant force in this hard world. He more than survived. He reached a future normal. He wrote his own story and became a legend.

Underlying this story of adaptation is a look back in the past. A look into the generations of dogs that preceded him. This is the call of the wild which he feels he must return to and be part of.

I usually have multiple books on the go at any one time. It drives Jill nuts as there seems to be a book in almost every room. One of the other books I am reading is Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. In one of the chapters he talks about order and chaos. He states, “Order is not enough. You just can’t be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned.” Buck, even though he is a dog, had new things to learn and so do we.

As a reminder, we are learning a lot of vital and important new things from the situation we find ourselves in. It won’t last forever and we will be better for it. We will have learned a lot in establishing our future normal.