On Mountains, Families, and the Work That Never Stays Done

I came into 2026 carrying a sense of peace. Not the spa-version of peace, but the deeper kind that comes from gaining altitude — literally and figuratively.

In December, I traveled to Peru and climbed through the terraces of Machu Picchu. From that vantage, surrounded by mountains that have witnessed centuries of human striving, the scale of everyday life shifted. The noise faded. The busyness stopped.

It reminded me of a philosophical story that, to me, appears like a kaleidoscope because it can be viewed so many different ways: the myth of Sisyphus. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus is condemned to push a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down every time — an eternity of unfinished work. The ancient Greeks saw it as punishment; the French philosopher Albert Camus saw something else entirely. He suggested that satisfaction can be found in the repetitive, the cyclical, the ongoing — that not all worthwhile efforts are meant to stay finished.

Nature, after all, sustains on rhythms. Waves rise and crash. The sun sets and rises. Breath goes in and out. We eat, are hungry and eat again. We sleep and we wake and we sleep again.

Walking along the Inka Trail in Peru, I realized that families are the same way. Families cycle through transitions, losses, new beginnings, conflicts, reconciliations. The work of a family doesn't end. The goal isn’t permanence; it’s continuity.

In family law, people often pretend the opposite — that the legal system can create a clean ending or a decisive victory. But courts are more like Sisyphus’s hill: after one boulder comes another. One motion becomes three. One hearing leads to the next. Even the “wins” rarely hold for long.

Collaborative work and thoughtful planning take a different perspective. Instead of brute forces colliding, the goal is cultivation. Instead of fighting for the summit, the work is to build terraces on the mountain — structures that support the family long after the professionals are gone.

Estate planning has that same rhythm. You don’t write your will once and lock it in a drawer forever. Lives change. Families evolve. Children grow. Houses are bought and sold. Health shifts. New concerns arise. It’s breathing work. And that’s not a flaw; that’s the design.

As I begin this new year, both in collaborative family law and estate planning, this is the perspective I’m carrying with me:

Not everything meaningful is meant to stay done. Some things are meant to be tended steadily over time. We don’t get to freeze time for the people we care about. What we can do is nurture what matters, step by step, and return to it again and again — much like Sisyphus pushing his boulder. Camus imagined Sisyphus content in the repetition itself, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” In each deliberate, mindful step, there is a quiet peace.

I wonder — did the Inkas curse walking back and forth across that trail, or did they, like Camus imagined for Sisyphus, find meaning in the rhythm itself?

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