“Did he get down at all today?”

It was about 7 in the evening. My husband had just gotten back home from work.

I had been pacing up and down our terrace for hours with Krishna on my back.

“No. Wait… yes. About five minutes. For a super-fast bath… Krishna, look! Appa’s home. Go climb on his back!”

“Aiyyo, just two minutes! Let me get changed first.”

Krishna was going through one of his worst phases of gut discomfort. Unless he was asleep, he wanted to lie on his stomach or be carried piggyback. There wasn’t much in between. We had stopped asking when it would get better and settled into a different rhythm instead. One of us carried him. The other made tea. We swapped places. We got through the day.

Around that time, my husband was offered a very interesting opportunity at work. It was the sort of opportunity that would have excited us a few years earlier. But it also meant giving up the work-from-home days and flexibility that had quietly become woven into our lives.

That evening, after Krishna had finally settled, we talked.

There was no drama. No sense of sacrifice. We simply looked honestly at the life we were already living and asked ourselves what mattered most to us at that point in time.

He decided not to take the job.

People often hear stories like this and say, “You gave up so much.”

I’ve never quite seen it that way.

Another family may have made a completely different decision. Another parent, equally devoted to their child, may have taken the opportunity because, for them, providing greater financial security was the most important thing they could do. They would not be wrong. Their deepest reason would still be love. Their answer would simply look different.

That’s why I’ve come to think that the choice itself isn’t the important part.

The *why* behind it is.

Why do I do what I do?

Why do I get up every morning?

Why do I go to work?

Why do I stay with my family?

Why do I spend my life the way I do?

They aren’t questions we can live with every day. We’d never get anything done. But every once in a while, life has a way of placing them in front of us, and it is worth sitting with them.

Because if the answers are still the same, then the choices still make sense.

The difficult days don’t disappear. The griefs don’t disappear. The occasional pang doesn’t disappear either. Every now and then you still wonder what another path might have looked like. You still need time to recover after life knocks the wind out of you. None of that changes.

What changes is the way you carry it.

When I know why I am living this life, the hardships become part of a journey I have willingly embraced. Not because I chose every circumstance. None of us gets to do that. But because I know why I keep choosing the life I have, even with all its complications. Every challenge becomes something to overcome, work around, grieve, adapt to, or simply learn to live with. The joy isn’t found because the challenges disappear. It comes from knowing that this is still the life I want to wake up to tomorrow.

When we lose sight of that deeper why, the very same hardships can begin to feel different. Not necessarily bigger, but heavier. They stop feeling like the price of something deeply worthwhile and start feeling like obstacles with no larger purpose. That is fertile ground for resentment, guilt, anger and jealousy—not because life has suddenly become harder, but because we can no longer see what all this effort is in service of.

Once I know that why, it becomes the thread that stitches my life together. Going to work. Caregiving. Nurturing relationships. Taking time for myself. None of them are competing priorities to be balanced against one another. They are simply different expressions of the same deeper purpose.

And that deeper purpose won’t look the same for everyone. One family may build their lives around being present at home. Another may find purpose in pursuing a demanding career that provides security and opportunity. Someone else may find it in teaching, creating, serving, exploring or caring. There isn’t one right way to arrange a life. What matters is that the pieces of our lives are moving in the same direction, guided by the same deeper reason for which we live them.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve never been completely convinced by the idea of work-life balance.

Balance has always sounded precarious to me, as though life were something we were trying desperately not to drop. But if every part of my life is being shaped by the same deeper why, then perhaps the question isn’t whether everything is in balance.

Perhaps the question is whether everything is in harmony.

And perhaps harmony isn’t something we achieve once and hold onto forever. Perhaps it is something we return to, every now and then, by asking ourselves those same simple questions again.

Why do I live this life?

Why do I make the choices I make?

If the answers are still the same, then I keep going. The challenges remain. The griefs remain. So does the joy. Because beneath all of it, I still know why I am living this life.