Anomie

Something that has always amazed me about humans is their adaptability. I'm not going Darwinistic and saying our necks (over generations) can turn giraffe-like if all our food randomly (over time) becomes only available at top-of-tree height; I am saying that our environment and situations constantly change, and we have been made so that we can change with it and find a new 'normal'.
I don't think there is such a thing as normal. Because life and relationships are so fluid there can't be a normal. There is only what we know of the past, our history, and what we think should be the future, our ideals. History and ideals, not normality.
One of the founding fathers of sociology, Emile Durkheim, labeled normlessness as 'anomie', referring to an eroding lack of societal structure which eventually becomes anarchical. But I think anomie is a constant state of life; it's how well you adapt to the change that prevents your life from erupting into chaos. A friend moves away, a family member dies, your job description changes, the semester ends and classes change, it snows. But it doesn't have to be the end of your happiness and stability.
I've always loved winter for many many reasons. Besides it being absolutely beautiful when it snows and the whiteness clings to the trees and blankets everything you see, I love how city life changes. In any other season you can drive as fast as you want to until you hit your fear threshold of being caught, you know which lanes will be the fastest, and you can predict the time within seconds it will take to get where you want to go. But in winter that all changes. A drive that used to take 10 minutes now takes 45, and you have no idea what bus, icy patch or accident you will run into on your way home.
Besides that, the lanes change. When snow is covering the ground you cannot see the lanes, the painted lines you are supposed to drive between. So you make it up. You adapt. You drive where you think you should. And when the friction from enough people's tracks melts the snow back down to the concrete, you can see how off you all have been. You discover you've been driving in the shoulder, you see that you are halfway in between lanes, either the white or the yellow, you see you've all been wrong. But it works. You adapt. You see the need for change and it gets changed.
Humans are so adaptable. We can live in plus 15 or minus 30 (even in the span of a week), we can live in the woods or on the prairie, on a mountain or in a valley, near a flowing river or in the middle of a desert. Our way of living and thinking can change.
Our lives certainly do. It may not look like our past, and it may not resemble what we had pictured in our heads but we are still in the middle of it, trying to make due with what we've got, trying to find joy and some semblance of prosperity.
Whatever happens, it's okay. We can learn to live anywhere, under any circumstances, in our constant state of anomie. God has made us that way so we can learn to depend on him for our stability, not any job, paycheck or friend. He wants us to thrive in diversity, not just hum along in comfortability.
Snowstorms will come but we will drive different.
And one day our food may relocate to the tops of cedar trees, but we will learn to climb them.