Work is the self we struggle to escape from

How I managed to take a break, against the odds.

I took the day off work today.

I was beginning to think it wasn’t possible.

I was sitting in a cafe close to home with my laptop

thinking of all the things I had to do.

And I realised the most important thing I had to do

was get away from the laptop.

I don’t want to blame my computer.

Or my phone.

Or my family.

Or my colleagues.

Or my house.

Or my friends.

Or my garden.

Or my chess board.

Or my books.

These things are my life, and I am glad and grateful for it.

But it’s a lot of work.

Coping. Creating. Responding. Recovering.

Self-ing.

Keeping the show on the road.

I believe work is not just what we are paid to do.

Work is everything we are responsible for or emotionally obliged to do.

Work is an imperial verb masquerading as an innocent noun.

Parenting is work. Cleaning is Work. Shopping is work.

Relationships are work. Conversations are work…

We used to live at home and go to work.

Then we started working from home.

And now, so the joke goes, we live at work.

But today I realised it’s no joke.

I really do live at work.

And it’s not because my home is like an office.

It’s because I am a creature of habit like everyone else.

And most of those habits are a kind of work.

Not just Email, Zoom, WhatsApp, Substack, Telegram, Signal, Text.

But also the dishwasher, the laundry, the bills, the unmade bed…

Even walking the streets, going to the gym, the pool, the sauna…

Being who we are, by doing what we do, becomes a trap.

Only quite rarely do we notice we are caught in it.

Today I felt: enough!

But how can I escape my own mind?

Who can I petition to release me from my habit energy?

I need a new place, a new activity, I thought.

I need to be somewhere I wouldn’t normally be so that I can simply be.

I need to do something I wouldn’t normally do, so that I can simply do.

You might be hoping for something spectacular now…

An existential revelation.

The secret to human freedom?

But no.

All I did was take an Uber for a 15-minute ride from Putney to Richmond Park.

Where I rented a bike for two hours.

The sun was out, but the experience was wonderful because it was ordinary.

I felt like an extra in a documentary about how humans are supposed to live.

And yet.

Gloriously, fabulously, and with breathtaking relief.

It was not work.

It’s true that I struggled up hills, out of breath, unsure if I would make it to the top.

But even that didn’t feel like work, because the challenge was so freely chosen.

I felt giddy going downhill, the wind at my back like an ancestor cheering me on.

I was tempted to keep accelerating so that I would fall off, just for the excitement.

I was wearing a helmet and would land on the grass…

What I feared was not that I would hurt myself,

but that I would come out of my senses

and back to my mind,

and start worrying about getting home…

And then work would creep back in.

So instead

I stopped periodically to gaze at old trees

in all their wrinkled glory, gratuitous limbs and distinctive permutations.

I was waiting for them to come alive,

while knowing they already are.

And I saw lots of deer. There are six hundred of them in the park.

Their dignified innocence felt like a language

I have forgotten how to speak.

I didn’t want it to end.

But I had to get back…

to work.

And you know what?

I felt newly blessed

to have work to get back to.