Moving On

This past weekend, my husband, son and I traveled to Chincoteaque Island in Virginia. It’s a favorite haunt of ours. Every spring, before their busy beach season, we like to go to get some peace and quiet, and see the wild ponies and other wildlife that roam neighboring Assateague Island National Park.

For 14 years now, we have been staying at the same cozy cottages. In the beginning, when money was particularly tight, we could always rationalize the annual escape because the price of our accommodations was right.

Over time, the choice to stay in these cottages became less a financial one and more a nostalgic one. We know the layout. They are just “right.” We reminisce about happy memories there as we create new ones.

This past weekend, however, we regrettably found ourselves noticing things we hadn’t before—the smell of smoke in the non-smoking unit where we were staying, the stained carpet where our son was crawling, how rundown things had become. Now that we were parents, we ironically discovered that the idyllic place we had fantasized about sharing with our family someday (perfect place to stay with kids, we thought) wasn’t quite so perfect after all.

After our first night there, we took a stroll down the road and happened upon a brand new hotel glistening in the sunlight—complete with balconies overlooking the bay. As we looked back at the cozy little cabins that still warm our hearts, we didn’t think twice. We checked out and into to someplace new.

I was struck by the realization that even when something in our lives was once perfect, the time might come when we’re ready to move on. It’s impossible to predict what we might be ready for instead until we get there. But when we have outgrown the current predicament of our lives, we know, and the choice becomes easy.

Once we were able to let go of our attachment to the quaint little cabins that had made us happy for so long, we experienced, what we called on our drive home to be “our best weekend in Chincoteague ever.”