The Enduring Power of Changeover Day

Summer camp taught me how to say goodbye. It also taught me how to never forget.

There’s a moment at summer sleepaway camp that doesn’t show up in the brochures or the promotional videos. It’s not the color war, or the talent show, or even the last-night campfire. It’s something quieter, almost invisible, but unforgettable to those who’ve lived it. And regardless of where you went to summer camp, if there was more than one session, then it had the same name:

Changeover Day.

It’s the hinge between sessions—when one group of campers pack up and say goodbye, while another rolls in with fresh sleeping bags and first-day nerves. There is, of course, a bit of chaos during changeover — even the most tightly run camps can get messy and trunks can be momentarily lost. Yet for a brief window of time on a midsummer day, an otherwise bustling camp quiets down and holds both the echo of what just was and the anticipation of what’s about to be.

Changeover Day is a moment that exists in the blur between endings and beginnings. A singular time reflecting what has been and what is yet to come.

As a product of summer camp (both as a camper and a counselor at Pinemere Camp in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania), I experienced 10 summers of these days. Pinemere, like all summer camps, had group rituals for the end of a session, a closing Shabbat service and sing-a-long (or just “Sing, in our parlance), a banquet and a beachside closing ceremony with wishes and wiped-away tears.

But there is also a personal ritual to Changeover Day. You strip your sheets and pick up the forgotten sock under the bed. You hug the kid who drove you nuts in week one and then became your best friend in week three. You take one last look at the bunk wall where you scrawled a quote or a joke or just your initials. And then you leave.

But not empty. You leave fuller than you came (and with a few new traded t-shirts as well).

I didn’t know it at the time, but reflecting back on Changeover Day, I think it was one of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned: how to say goodbye in a way that honors what just happened, and how to carry it forward without trying to recreate it. Leaving camp, whenever you leave camp, sparks a particular kind of emotional intelligence. Not everything special gets to last forever, you realize, but that doesn’t make it any less meaningful. Most of all, you learn to mark the end of something transformative not by trying to hold on too tightly, but by noticing it, naming it, and moving through it with some kind of grace.

What’s strange is how often that same rhythm plays out far beyond camp. The older I get, the more I see changeover days in everyday life. It’s in the moment you leave a job you invested in, or end a relationship that mattered, or say goodbye to someone you weren’t ready to lose. Sometimes, as adults, changeover days show up with happy hours and parting emails. But many others are transitions that don’t get proper acknowledgement. Those changeover days feel like the quiet fadeouts, the turning of seasons, the awkward in-betweens where you’re no longer who you were but not quite yet who you’re becoming.

I’ve come to believe, particularly these days when I am feeling like I am in the midst of multiple concurrent changeover days, that part of being fully alive is learning how to be present in those liminal spaces. Not rushing through them, not numbing out, but actually being “in it” — feeling the ache of parting and the weight of memory without trying to tie everything up with a bow. Like those changeover days from summer camp, sometimes the transitions are messy. They are filled with lots of activity, but often feel like they are premature or even, in some cases, overdue.

Jewish life is filled with rituals that help us acknowledge these moments. Havdalah, the ceremony that marks the end of Shabbat and the beginning of the new week, captures a blend of sweetness and smoke that teaches us how to separate what was holy from what comes next. Yizkor, a ceremony for the memory of loved ones we have lost, creates space for remembering, not just grieving. Even the Jewish calendar is structured around transition — around the practice of return.

But modern life, particularly in our “thank you, what’s next?” era of instant gratification often skips the pause that faith inspires. We tend to move fast. We are told to optimize. We follow, we ghost, we unfollow, we upgrade. Yes, in so many ways, the world tells us to detach quickly and get on with it. Yet camp changeover days taught me something different. They taught me that goodbyes are not detours; they’re part of the path.

That endings deserve attention so that new beginnings can arise.

There is a sense of applied optimism buried in that statement. It’s not the pithy optimism of “we’ll keep in touch” or “you’ll make new friends.” It’s the quieter, purposeful kind of optimism, the belief that what we experience becomes part of us. That memory isn’t just looking back; it’s how we build forward. Changeover Day taught me that you can leave a place and still carry it with you.

That people, moments, and places leave fingerprints on the heart that don’t wash off.

I don’t think I understood it fully back then, when I was 14 and sunburned, bug bitten and hoarse from the last late conversations before the sun rose. But I do now. And every so often, I catch myself in a changeover day moment—saying a quiet goodbye, feeling a shift, starting something new. And I remember: you don’t have to hold on to everything to remember it.

You just have to notice it as it changes, and let it mean something.

Just like Changeover Day.