Work as a Return to the Self
As an anthropologist, writer, and coach I have been drawn to this question: how do we make meaning from our work? My earliest impressions of work came from the long afternoons I spent in my father’s studio, watching him sketch. As my child’s eye absorbed it, work emerged from my father’s hands as lines on butter paper, formed in a pool of light on a drafting table that overlooked the untamed foliage outside. Curves and shapes danced on the page, appearing spontaneously. As my father and his students built architectural models, I lay on the floor, gluing scraps of foam board together, as they humored my attempts to mimic their craft of giving form to lines on paper.
Photo: Tilak Samarawickrema sketching
My time in his studio imprinted in me a sense of work as a space of making. I intuited then that work was created within a space. The space was generative of the work. The quality of light, the objects, the feelings they evoked, all shaped its formation. The creations arose as an expression of the self, an exploration in conversation with others and the materials at hand.
In the words of Tim Ingold, “the forms of things arise within fields of force and flows of material.” In my father’s studio, the objects designed—a building, a tapestry, a drawing—all emerged from this exploration of interior and exterior spaces, improvised through bricolage, through unanticipated discoveries enfolded in the process of making. This work could not be estranged from the self that made it, the collective of people who participated, or the context from which it was born.
Drawings and tapestries: Tilak Samarawickrema
Work and the Self
Years later, I have come to see work as a space of making in two senses—the outer space in which work is created and the inner space from which it emerges. We make our work in the conversation that unfolds between these inner and outer spaces—between the interiority of our minds and the environments and social worlds we are embedded in. Work becomes site of connection, a bridge between the self and the world. It can also be source of estrangement from it.
Perhaps, for this reason, work reveals deep fissures between the self and the world—between our internal pull towards work that brings us meaning and the expectations placed upon us, between our ethics and the values of the systems in which we function, between our desire to serve and fears about our own survival, between our longing to create at our own pace and the pressures of timelines outside our control.
When we give up on these inner longings and work in a way that suppresses them, it takes us away from ourselves. As Marx wrote so incisively in his 1844 manuscripts, when we are estranged from our work, from the process by which we work, the people we work with, and the things we spend our time making, we also become strangers to ourselves. This saps us of our vitality. It creates a kind of deadening. He described this experience powerfully in spatial terms: we feel outside of ourselves when we at work and can only feel inside of ourselves away from work.
Work that Reconnects
How do we return from this estrangement?
The way back in, as I see it, is by recovering our vitality. It is by inquiring where we access that sense of aliveness, of absorption, of alignment and congruence. It is by leaning into those moments where a thought emerges while working: “This is me.” Our spine straightens. The body speaks. It is a kind of waking up. If we follow this alignment, we can slowly trace our way back through the things we create to the inner world from which they emerge.