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A Meditation With My Father
In Between Breaths
Some meditations don’t last minutes or hours. Some stretch across lifetimes. There’s one such meditation that returns to me again and again. It begins, always, with a walk — my father and I, wandering through the corridors of a house long surrendered to memory. It is the home where he was born, where boyhood bloomed into youth. The walls remember more than we ever spoke aloud.
In this meditation, I take him out for ice cream. We walk the old neighborhood, a place time has softened but never erased. We talk, not urgently, not with any destination. The conversation moves easily — from dreams to childhood, from love to the strange demands of family. There is nothing remarkable about it, and yet, it is everything.
There is a strange cruelty in the way life organizes itself. We can spend years — decades even — sharing walls, rituals, and genes with the people we love, and yet struggle to find a single moment of true connection. One conversation, undistracted. One walk, uninterrupted.
It is only when I close my eyes and drop beneath the weight of everydayness that I find him. And me. Not as father and daughter. Not as roles burdened with obligation, expectation, or history. But as two souls. Unadorned. Sharing a sliver of light between the breaths of life.
