My wife and I were in Virginia Beach last weekend, as I mentioned in a couple of this week’s pieces. We did a few things differently than all our other visits down there: we drove home on the mainland rather than the peninsula, for the scenic drive and to try out a country ham from Surry. We ate at different restaurants—usually we do a sushi all-you-can-eat and a seafood and crab leg buffet, but both of them were underwhelming last time.

This time, we took an evening walk along the boardwalk after dinner at a hip little place. I’m glad we were out a little late, and had parked a few blocks from the beachfront, because we saw this!

Cops patrolling on horseback!

Our Airbnb had a pool, and we’ve stayed there before and never really used it. This time we jumped in. And after a very good happy hour by the beach ($1 raw clams and oysters, and $8 cocktails), we brought home some pupusas from a little place in an aging strip plaza (I do believe we were the only non-Hispanic people in the store), which were very good and very cheap, and had some wine and takeout by the pool. The whole trip was lovely—because we didn’t do the same things we did the first time we went there, the trip felt the same as that first one.

I’m one of those people who likes doing familiar things—when I visit a place again, I like to do things in the same order, or do the same things, walk the same routes, eat at the same restaurants, often take the same pictures over the years. I liken it, in some ways, to anamnesis, the doctrine of the Eucharist that says the Last Supper is made present now by the invocation of the words of institution (“This is my body, this is my blood”). That’s a mystery and a mystical idea; I suppose I think of our human rituals as a sort of shadow of that.

There’s a part of me that feels like by not tracing the same steps, I’m breaking some continuity—that the ability to access your past is contingent on repeating it in the present. Or something like that.

But I thought of something else as we drove new routes and ate new foods and visited different things at different times: don’t make your life a cover band of itself. All of those mini rituals and traditions that form in your life were once innovations; you did everything for the first time. That excitement, and sometimes nervousness, is a good thing, too. And the only way to recapture the feeling is to change the things you do. (The only way to retain the substance is to change the form; sorry, I’m using too many Catholic words.)...