This past week my husband and I went to Pt Reyes National Seashore and stayed at the very same campground, Sky Camp, that we had stayed at over 30 years ago, the very first time I had come to visit him in California.  The occasion was our 30th wedding anniversary. We realized we hadn’t been back there, just the two of us, for a very long time.  We were both amazed by the rush of nostalgia and the layers of memories that flooded us.  We were moved by the passing of an entire family lifecycle that had happened between these two points in time.  We had wed, birthed two children, raised two children (school year by school year), built a home, pursued and experienced two careers,  sent our girls off to college, launched two young adults, watched our parents age and buried my two parents, together. As we traversed the very same camp site, spot  #01, there was something very tender for us in recognizing how we had changed.  The flexible bodies and naive minds of the young couple we were, who barely knew each other, had now become the aching bodies and experienced minds of the well known to each other, older adults, we are now. 

Earlier that week, on the exact night of our anniversary, we had gone out to dinner to celebrate.  It was a lovely dinner, but a dinner. It didn’t stimulate the intense perspective of our weekend trip.  There was something about being in the place we were at the time of our early connection that was so powerful.  The complete sensory context was enveloping.  The smells of the pines and the cypress, the ocean air, the setting sun over the ocean, the echoes of the bird calls and the climb up the hill to the campground recreated an experience of long ago, but in our current day form.  Something about the overlap of a new experience overtop the old memory was profound.  A timewarp of sorts, cradling an entire family birth, growth, and passing ons.

I feel so grateful for this emotional surprise.  There’ve been times I’ve returned to a place I enjoyed hoping to relive the magic and am disappointed.  I plan a whole trip around having the fun I had in the past, but it’s not the same.  And maybe that’s the lesson.  It’s not the same, it can never be the same.  If you go back to a place you’ve been, you’re bringing “current you” and “current you”’s life.  But if you go back with the intention of honoring something about the place that was special for you, yet expecting to create a new experience there, you are building on the past.  We weren’t going to Sky Camp to relive what we had done, but to honor it.

The literal meaning of milestone is a stone placed beside a road to show the distance to a particular destination. These stones give you a perspective as to how far you’ve come.  They serve as benchmarks for distances traveled and the time and effort it’s taken to get there.  Traveling to celebrate our milestone was a fortuitous coming together of our intention and our effort that set up the possibility for a little unexpected magic. It created the emotional and physical opportunity to stop and appreciate where we’ve been and how far we’ve come.  It was also a good perspective as to what we have left.  As my husband pointed out, we won’t be coming back again in another 30 years.  Perhaps we should go again a little sooner.