Have you ever stumbled upon an old journal entry and felt an immediate, full-body cringe? A desperate urge to travel back in time, grab your younger self by the shoulders, and say, “For the love of all that is good, that poet-sleeve blouse is a terrible idea”? I had one of those the other day when I found my old AngelFire site from the late 90s on the Wayback Machine.

Yikes.

So much bad poetry and angst.

And what was I thinking with gold eyeshadow, blue mascara, and a raisin colored lip?

Woof.

It reminded me of line from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alice, trying to explain her bizarre day, says timidly to the Caterpillar, “I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning, but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”

It’s a line delivered with a child’s simple honesty, yet it holds a truth we adults often try to wrestle into submission.

The person you were yesterday is not, in some small or significant way, the person you are today.

The events of a single day can redraw the map of who we are.

We are not static beings carved from stone; we are rivers, constantly flowing, changing course, and picking up sediment and stories along the way.

This all got me thinking about a place we used to have here in Carlisle, years ago now. It was a coffee shop called Courthouse Commons. It sat on the main square, a literal stone’s throw from the county courthouse, and it was, by any objective measure, a glorious mess. It was filled with dumpy, comfortable couches you could sink into for hours, a fleet of mismatched tables and chairs that somehow all worked together just fine, and a rotating gallery of local art of varying quality but uniform heart.

It wasn’t just a business; it was Carlisle’s community living room.

On any given day, you’d see the beautiful, messy cross-section of our town in there swilling coffee and chatting. Lawyers on a break from the courthouse mingled with college students procrastinating on a term paper. You’d see our unhoused neighbors nursing a warm drink and talking to the mayor, townies who had been here for generations talking to newcomers, and all manner of regular folks just having chats across educational and financial spectrums. And once a week, for open mic night, we’d all cram into that beloved space while the fire marshal conveniently developed a sudden case of IDGAF about capacity numbers.

For nearly a decade, this was the way it was.

And then, one day, it wasn’t.

The owner, a woman with a spirit as warm as her espresso machine, decided she was ready for her next adventure. Her time as a coffee-shop-proprietor-slash-community-curator was complete. It was time for her next adventure.

The day she started telling us regulars she’d be closing, the air was thick with a sweet, poignant sadness. We were losing our living room. But beneath that sadness was a current of genuine joy for her. She was leaving to work in the non-profit world, helping people find homes—a mission born, in part, from the very community she had fostered. We were so proud of her.

And then somehow, the narrative shifted when it got out to the broader community. The local paper got wind of the closing and the story was reported with a somber tone: another ‘failed’ business in downtown.

Failed.

The word landed with a thud of confusion.

Courthouse Commons wasn’t losing money. If anything, they were more popular than ever.

Folks who didn’t know WHY she was shutting down equated closing with failing.

Because it didn’t last forever, it couldn’t possibly have been a success.

This, right here, is the quiet poison in our cultural well.

We have turned ‘forever’ into the only acceptable definition of success.

A friendship that provides immense joy for five years but then naturally concludes as lives diverge is often viewed as less valuable, not a ‘real’ friendship. A marriage that was good and loving for a decade, that produced wonderful children and immense personal growth, is branded a ‘failed marriage’ if it ends in divorce.

And heaven knows, we see this in congregations/churches as well.

A beloved minister decides to leave for a different adventure, and whispers of ‘the end of an era’ sound more like a eulogy than a celebration.

A vibrant social action program or committee that met the needs of its time is phased out for something new, and it’s treated as a tragic loss rather than a necessary evolution.

Hell, you move some group’s closet to a different room and it can elicit wailing and gnashing of teeth. Well maybe not actual gnashing of teeth, but definitely some temper tantrums and threats to leave the church.

It would be laughable if it weren’t so damn true.

We get so attached to the form of our communities—the specific programs, the specific leaders, the specific way we’ve always done the potluck—that we forget its function is to be a living thing, responding to the needs of today, not yesterday.

This framework is fundamentally broken.

It suggests that the value of an experience is not in the having of it, but only in the endless keeping of it.

It’s an idea that stagnates us, making us cling to things—identities, relationships, committees—long after they have ceased to fit the person, or the community, we have become. It whispers that to let go is to fail, that to change is to admit defeat.

Courthouse Commons wasn’t a failure. It was a spectacular success that lasted for almost ten years.

It did exactly what it needed to do, for exactly as long as it needed to.

It was a chapter, not the whole book.

And its ending didn’t erase the beauty of its pages.

We could, and should, learn from that.

Like Alice said, it’s no use going back to yesterday. We were different people then.

The grace is in accepting that.

The freedom is in honoring the chapters of our lives for what they were—whether it’s a coffee shop, a friendship, or the way we do community with one another—and then having the courage to turn the page.