There’s a great line from The Office series finale when Andy Bernard says:

“I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”

At our staff meeting last week, we talked about this sentence.

We wanted them to realize they are in those days right now.

This summer. These kids. This session. The campers who lose their water bottle every other day (it’s a good thing we label them). The 75th time we’ve said “We can…do hard things”.

In a month, when everyone’s back at school or back at a desk, we’d trade almost anything for one more day of exactly this.

We feel this every year, summer after summer.

Nostalgia, in reverse

What if you could feel how much you’re going to miss something in the future before it’s even gone?

That’s the exact thing Andy is describing. He only realized they were the good old days once those days were already behind him.

But if you can feel now how much you’ll miss something later, you carry yourself differently while you’re in it. Not perfectly. Just more awake to it.

Our mantra for these last few weeks of camp is “live camp to the fullest”.

It’s a message for the staff. But not just that.

The staff wasn’t expected to walk back into each cabin and announce:

“THESE ARE THE GOOD OLD DAYS! ACT ACCORDINGLY!”

They aren’t going to return to a cabin of nine-year-olds and quote a sitcom from 2010 (they’d get a very polite blank stare).

It’s more like this: if the people running the day believe and know each day is special, the campers feel it. It comes through in a hundred small ways none of us could name if we tried.

And we already know this to be true because I hear the other side of it all year. In the fall, in the spring, when we run into campers and staff out in the world, the sentences are almost always the same.

“I miss camp.”

“I’m counting down the days.”

“I just want to see my camp friends.”

We’ve talked before about why camp is sticky. It’s the well-being stack: Fun, Challenge, Friendship, and Reflection, all of it together, for multiple weeks at a time. You can’t get that in a single afternoon. You get it in a summer.

And once you get it, you miss it when it’s not there.

A skill worth practicing

Here’s the skill we’re practicing: can we anticipate what’s going to be true in a week, a month, or a year, and can knowing that help us make the best decisions now?

This comes up all the time outside of camp.

If you know you’ll be hungry by 1pm, you eat real protein at breakfast.

If you can already feel how good it is to walk into a test you are prepared for, you open the book and study the night before.

Reaching for a feeling that hasn’t happened yet tends to make us sharper in the present.

The camp version is simple. Don’t waste a day. The good old days are happening right now, and you’re standing in them.

It doesn’t require anybody to be at their best. It just asks them to be intentional.

We are in the good old days

You’re reading this from home. Some parents are already thinking about next summer. Some parents have a camper who just returned home and won’t stop talking about camp. Some are still refreshing the daily photos, catching your camper right in the middle of it.

If you can, look closely. That’s the good old days in real time. Not a memory yet. Still going on while you look.

That’s what we’re embracing this week. Not the idealized version of camp. The real one, felt all the way, while it’s still here.

You see it in the photos. I see it walking around in the heat. A few hundred campers in the good old days, whether they know it yet or not.

Remember the good old days? Me too. They’re happening right now.

Erec Sir