“No matter how hard you try to escape the future, the future will find you anyway,” observes Thad Russell, a photographer and an instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design.
In the Atlantic Monthly, Russell shared how he found his “late parents’ former house in northern Vermont listed on Airbnb.”
Russell’s father was an MIT-trained architect who wanted to make a home from “locally sourced wood, stone, and glass.“ The goal was to construct “a modern-day frontier house—hand-built, off the grid, and completely DIY.”
But after Russell’s parents died, Russell and his siblings decided that, along with his parent’s property needing a significant amount of restoration, they would be inheriting “a way of life, a philosophy, a set of values that we all respected, but didn’t fully subscribe to…. [so] with heavy hearts, we decided to let it go.”
When they returned to their parent’s home as Airbnb guests, they saw how the new owners had removed “the vegetable garden; the windmill; the woodshed, wood stoves… the solar electric system… [but the new] interior was stunning… no more exposed electrical wires or pipes. A new floor was made out of spotted maple… The decor was modern and sparse—chairs made out of soft Italian leather and German stainless-steel appliances… the house had never looked better… more finished, more realized. The future looked good on this house.“
Although we might want to hold onto the past, there are times when we need to let go – of a parent’s home, a way of life, our expectations of what we thought would happen – and choose to embrace what the future unfolds before us. And more often than not, as Russell observes, when the future finds us, it will surprisingly exceed our predictions and our expectations.
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