This is a working session on the following questions: ‘What constitutes a crisis?’ ‘How to know if one is in the middle of one’? ‘What does it mean to realize (suddenly) one is in a crisis?’ How does a crisis feel, while one is used to habits, living by social norms and expectations of one’s self and others. In other words: ‘What is normal?’ We seem to need the word crisis to express something, but what exactly?

Example: My son is diagnosed as autistic, a challenge for him and for his parents. His ‘normal’ is not my ‘normal’. There is no doubt I recognized him being psychotic (having psychotic episodes) during the first half of last year. But that is not to say that my own thoughts, feelings and relation to my son and other family members and friends were clear to me or in any way under control. Obviously, the situation was very difficult for my son, but I needed to accept that as a family we needed help.

Example: I have felt the weather not being normal for a long time already, probably more than 10 – 15 years already. And I mean based on my own observations and experience other than reading the news and following the forecasts. This situation is now coming to the foreground, where some years ago a newspaper like the Guardian was the first to publicly speak of a climate crisis in all its publications (instead of using the words global warming). We are now getting used to the words poly-crisis and to people stating that living in these times of crisis, is the new normal. Does that mean it is not a crisis anymore?