Year Eight - Finding our Rythym

Today marks eight years since Mom passed. In many spiritual traditions, the number eight symbolizes balance, harmony, and infinity. Lately, I have been thinking about how much of life is really spent searching for that delicate equilibrium between joy and grief, ambition and presence, movement and stillness.

This past year brought both extraordinary gifts and difficult lessons, and, as always in life’s most pivotal moments, I found myself wishing Mom were still here to hold my hand through it all.

This year, Thomas, Lila, and I moved into our new home overlooking Lake Michigan. For us, this home once felt impossible.

Many years ago, while I was still in college, I worked weekends for a real estate agent who sold condos overlooking Millennium Park when very few people lived downtown. My job was to stage apartments for showings and arrange rented furniture so potential buyers could imagine themselves living there.

I still remember standing by those windows staring out at the lake and quietly praying to the universe that one day I might wake up to a view like that myself. Bodies of water have always carried deep emotional meaning for me.

When I returned home to Bombay during college summers, Mom and I would drive alongside the Arabian Sea listening to music and talking endlessly about life. Sometimes we would stop the car simply to stand there together and feel the salty air against our skin while imagining the futures we hoped for ourselves.

We always dreamed of living near water because it reminded us of resilience, movement, and the quiet depth that exists beneath the visible surface of things. Now the lake has become my sea.

Unlike the Arabian Sea, Lake Michigan does not retreat and return with the tides. Instead, it mirrors the sky and seasons so completely that it feels like a different body of water every single day.

I have watched it freeze into a white, endless tundra during winter storms.
I have watched sheets of ice shimmer silver beneath pale sunlight.
I have watched it roar violently on windy days and become impossibly calm beneath perfect blue skies.

The lake feels alive in a way that constantly reminds me that transformation is nature’s default state.

Over the last two decades, this shoreline has quietly witnessed so many chapters of my life.

When Thomas and I first fell in love, we spent endless afternoons walking along the lake with our chaotic group of friends, taking boats to Navy Pier, sitting in parks by the water, and watching fireworks explode against the skyline while discussing the biggest questions we could imagine.

Mom and I used to spend entire days shopping on Michigan Avenue before inevitably ending up somewhere overlooking the lake, eating ice cream, and talking about everything unfolding in our lives.

Dad and I have walked alongside the water while he softly chanted his prayers beneath the sound of crashing waves.
And now Lila spends summers building sandcastles, diving fearlessly into freezing water, and insisting that, because she was born during a snowstorm, she is immune to the cold. We continue allowing her to believe this. Perhaps she will someday become a scientist in Antarctica.

The lake has witnessed some of our happiest moments.

But it also holds one of our most painful ones.

Mom’s ashes rest there.

While I do not believe the lake is where she ultimately “is,” I often imagine it as the place where she crossed some invisible threshold into whatever comes next in her journey beyond this life.

Having finally arrived at a life that once felt impossible to us, I feel deeply grateful for the contemplative rhythm this landscape now offers our family each day.

When life feels overwhelming, I look out at the water and remember that nothing remains fixed forever. Tomorrow always arrives differently.

The lake reminds me daily not to take ordinary moments for granted because we have watched too many people cross beyond the horizon since Mom’s passing.

Nature has quietly taught me that no two days are ever truly the same, even when the ingredients appear identical. We are all given twenty-four hours each day, and how we shape those hours ultimately becomes our life.

Not every day needs to be extraordinary.

But we must learn how to weave beauty, connection, reflection, and joy into the ordinary rhythms that make up most of our existence.

Long before nature taught me these lessons, though, my parents did.

I grew up watching two extraordinary human beings wake up each morning and move through life with grace, regardless of the challenges that stood before them. They never allowed bitterness to overtake the sanctuary they created around themselves and the people they loved.

What stands out most to me now is how emotionally transparent they were with me. I witnessed their joy, fear, stress, tenderness, frustration, hope, and resilience openly. They constantly adjusted, recalibrated, and evolved through life while somehow preserving softness within themselves.

I existed quietly inside the rhythm they created together, and those rhythms eventually became the roots of my own life.

Like nature itself, Mom and Dad treated each day as a chance to begin again.

They refused to let the noise of the world extinguish the gentleness within them.

The light they cultivated became a refuge for others, and even when they themselves were exhausted, they somehow continued to find ways to make others feel seen, celebrated, and cared for.

Over time, I realized that this service to others replenished them rather than depleted them. It connected them to something larger than themselves and allowed them to move through life with purpose, dignity, and peace.

My dad still carries that same remarkable lightness today. He remains fluid in his expectations of the world, which somehow allows him to continue dreaming, taking risks, and approaching life with wonder even after profound loss.

Now Thomas, Lila, and I are slowly finding our own rhythm inside this larger dance of life.

As we enter this eighth year without Mom, I hope the lessons we continue receiving teach us how to move through life with greater trust: trust that we are shaped by the people meant to shape us, surrounded by the people meant to walk alongside us, and constantly unfolding into who we are meant to become.

Wishing all of you balance, harmony, and gentleness in your own lives.

Thank you for continuing to walk beside us through all of these years, for your notes, voicemails, stories, and love as we remember Mom today.