HFW- Home From Work
Have We Learned Nothing from WFH?
Questions while returning to work after two years of working from home —
If our homes had enough space to fit work in them, can our workplaces hold some home for us? Can we be homeful at work? Will we return to work as if the pandemic was a blip, as if we learned nothing?
As we face a new schedule of going to work and not just logging into it, we are homesick in advance. We know it is time to embrace it all again: the gathering of people at a place to persist upon a project, the dust and sound en route to office, the immense physicality of in-person learning and meetings. We are sick of staring into screens. We anticipate IRL discussions over lunch. We are eager for the energy exchange between humans, stuff that the most electric of our devices refuse to facilitate.
But we are not going to transition easily, we rarely do. We need time to process what working from home offered to us. Some of us even joined a new workplace virtually. We were so grateful, for no matter how uncomfortable or humbling a day at work was, we were held in a comfortable, familiar space. We did not have to transition into a new job, a new city, and a new house all at once like we had to in the past. We could take our own time. Time. That’s the key to it all. Working from home made us feel time-rich, the only form of richness our kind lusts after.
Can we make time at work? Can we take a book break the way some people take a smoke break? Can we nap on a soft chair? We are not interested in the right to wear pyjamas all the time, but can we find some home in work clothes? Yes.
Here’s the deal - when we return, let’s tweak a few things. We carry extra dabbas of namkeen and pickle if it brings us joy. We don’t carry anything that makes our bag heavier than the bags we carried to school as kids. Carrying our body with care is more important to us than lugging a machine on our backs. We don’t bend.
While we cover our faces with N95, we shed all the other masks. Showing up just as we are makes us instantly vulnerable, but eventually brave. We make tasty new mistakes. We drop things. We cough without hitting the mute button. We show how we are humans and not tiles on a computer. At home, amidst umpteen gadgets and machines, we saw and allowed ourselves to be human. At work, we do not go back to being machines ourselves. We laugh at full volume. We hydrate, even if it means we pee three more times. And we hum Thendral Vanthu Theendumbothu in the washroom.
Let’s take our hobbies to work. Come on! No? Yes. We take the deck of cards we learned magic with, the little keyboard we jammed on, the book of poetry with purple page flags. We plant a plant at work. We breathe and pull focus. We work so freakin well, so efficiently, with much competence, with such self-knowledge, saying NA-AH to things that reduce us, saying YE-AH to things that expand us, that we fucking finish the work at work, and return with only the fierce motivation to rest and recreate. We come home, fill our wells with our favourite writers and musicians and scientists and philosophers, energized to go back the next day, and do the same thing, but of course, differently.
We don’t go back on auto-pilot. We go like the Wright brothers, inventing new ways of flying into the same sexy state of flow, balancing challenge with skills. We go fully present, housed well in our bodies, like moisturized, well-fed, well-rested babies, but all grown up and ready to face a wild world. We gotta home from work.