This month, my youngest leaves for college. We've spent most of the summer getting her ready for this new chapter. After we move her in, my husband and I are taking a road trip up the Pacific Coast Highway without a firm agenda beyond where we plan to stay along the way. We are both excited, and it helps because honestly, neither of us is quite ready to walk into an empty house and call it normal yet.
Professionally, it's been a quieter year with fewer deals and more open space on the calendar than I'm used to. I won’t pretend that I’m not nervous. However, this year, the timing feels less like a coincidence and more like something I needed… I don't think I could have shown up fully for this particular goodbye if I was also juggling five closings.
In my gut, I am holding both genuine excitement and deep unease. Change unsettles me the same way it probably unsettles you, regardless of whether it’s the good kind, the kind that we have known is coming, and have planned for. This quietly lurking fear, this hum of uncertainty that defies understanding is something I hear in conversations with clients and friends too. Some of it is life phase, like ours. Some of it is larger than that; very little in the wider world encourages steadiness right now. But I've noticed that when the world feels less predictable, I think more, not less, about what home actually means. Not the square footage or the market value, but the feeling of it. The atmosphere inside the front door, where you can exhale and finally rest has a heightened value right now.
This season has given me something I did not have before - a deeper understanding of what it means for a home to hold a transition like this one. I have always brought care to helping clients find the right space. But there is a difference between understanding that as a matter of professional practice, and having lived it myself. Perhaps that is the thread running through all of it: an empty nest, an unsettled world, a quieter season of work. Each point toward the same question - what does home need to feel like, right now, to the people we love?
So, if someone in your life is quietly considering their own version of this, whether it is a move, a downsize, or a fresh beginning, I would be genuinely grateful for the introduction. It is not because my time is more available than usual, but because I understand this particular kind of transition somewhat more deeply than I did a year ago.
If a name has come to mind, I would welcome it.
Nilmini
