The best parenting advice I ever got? Easy. “Everything is a phase.”

This little tidbit, offered by a therapist I didn’t even like, isn’t exactly a new insight. If anything, it’s a more positive restatement of the mantra that got my grandparent’s generation through wars and depressions and the disco era.

“This too shall pass,” I would hear people say.

Everything is a phase.

For me, this is the rare bit of folk wisdom that turns out to be both true and helpful. You think you can’t take another moment of your child pretending to be a red panda, and then all of a sudden you’re helping them research vampire squid—which feels like progress until you’re 15 months into the deep sea creature phase. Still, you know by that time that everything is a phase. It won’t be forever. That’s good news.

And also terrible.

August is the end of an intense phase in the camping profession, where I earn my paycheck. When campers begin arriving, everyone on staff goes into a dead sprint—registrations, adventure activities, kitchen mishaps, homesickness, rainouts, and a thousand other things keep you moving nonstop. Most days feel like multiple days strung together. I can’t always remember eating breakfast.

And then it stops. All at once, the campers leave. The summer staff—including our two young adult children—go back to their homes or colleges. Fields and buildings that sounded with activity for 10 solid weeks fall silent. Our home goes empty.

This is the downside of the everything is a phase mentality. When one ends, it’s a relief to no longer deal with those particular stressors. But you also lose the good things tied to that phase. Sometimes you get them back. Sometimes you don’t. And it doesn’t really matter how you feel about it. Time moves forward. It gives and takes away. Your control is limited.

That’s not a complaint. It’s just the nature of the world we inhabit. We have to figure out how to respond to it.

For me, that means viewing the end of summer as a chance to reemerge into a very different but still very good life. The coming season will be lonelier and less exciting than the one that just closed. But I will also have a chance to read books and engage my writing projects anew. I’ll visit some friends and spend a week hiking and go on a few dates with my wife.

Speaking of Denise, she would want me to point out that losses need to be mourned, even trivial ones from a now past phase. That’s true enough. I don’t disagree.

Still, it feels good to emerge from the chaos of summer into a more steady fall existence. The only way to embrace the good of this new phase is to release the old. After all, empty hands are full of potential.

Onward.