Remembering we belong
Belonging isn’t earned. It’s freely available and gifted. What becomes possible now when we remember our belonging?
I talk so much about work, careers, and institutions, in part because I spent 20 years studying and designing them. And I’m particularly interested in how much space work they take up in our bodies, minds, souls, and especially our imaginations, in what we believe is possible for our individual and collective futures.
It’s about restorying our relationships. Of what it means and feels like to come back home. Back into relationships with yourself, with others, and the more-than-human world you are already part of.
It’s coming full circle to where we started when the prompt was to compare belonging to your career to belonging with the land on which you live, your local community, and the geographical region you find yourself in. Deinstitutionalizing work, then, it’s about reorienting ourselves back home within ourselves, and actually not at all about quitting (unless you want to).
In the career grief project I’m working on, I’ve come to see everything through relationships of belonging. The questions then shift to help identify what kinds of relationships you want to cultivate with your belonging:
What if my relationship to work could become more reciprocal?
What if my relationship to my body could become more accepting and trusting?
What if my relationship to success became more spacious and natural?
What if my relationship to grief became one of becoming?
What if my relationship to Place became one of stewardship, delight, and connection?
A place of work can be a place of connection without becoming all-consuming. It can nourish you without defining all of you. You can contribute your gifts without owing it all of yourself. Relationships can be reciprocal without requiring sacrifice.
Several years ago, I invited readers to write a love letter to your place of work. At the time, it was much easier to think of Place as mountains, gardens, and walking trails than as my J-O-B, but my campus office was a 1960s windowless concrete building.
I began paying more attention to the trees and gardens on campus, the students I walked beside, and the quiet ways the land greeted me each day. In doing so, I loosened my attachment to the story that I should keep overing because I should be grateful to belong. I let go of owing them my life and health. Instead, I learned to thank the land for holding me and humans and more-than-humans for connecting with me.
Looking back, I don't think I've spent this month writing about institutions at all. I've been writing about imagination. About what becomes possible when we remember that institutions were never meant to hold all of who we are. About imagining more regenerative relationships with ourselves, our work, our communities, and the Places that hold us throughout our lives.
And perhaps that's the antidote to institutional belonging. Not becoming someone new. You’re already amazing. But returning home to yourself often enough that you can choose, again and again, the stories you want to live.
What kind of relationships do you want to cultivate with yourself, your work, and the places that hold you?
