It is not work. It is life
It is not work. It is life
Some lives are lived in chapters. Mine moved across continents – from a childhood in Sri Lanka shaped by a father’s ironed shirts and a mother’s careful arithmetic, through the gleaming transience of Dubai, to the quieter demands of fatherhood in Sydney. I did not set out to write about work. I set out to understand what I had mistaken it for. This is what I found.
Myfather’s shirts hung on the back of a wooden chair, ironed the night before with care that bordered on ritual. He believed in preparation. The morning began not with haste but with deliberation. A man did not rush into duty; he approached it properly dressed.
He was not a man of loud speeches. Yet his habits instructed more firmly than any sermon. He would examine his ledger at home, recalculating columns he had already checked yesterday. It was not mistrust of his calculations. It was mistrust of error. To err through carelessness was, to him, a kind of moral lapse.
My mother’s labour was less visible but more relentless. The house was her enterprise. She managed scarcity with arithmetic that felt almost sacred. Rice, sugar, kerosene – each measured. Each anticipated. If my father believed in precision, my mother believed in continuity. Her work ensured that tomorrow resembled today – orderly, dependable, intact.
There are certain phrases we inherit without examination. “Working life” is one of them. It suggests a partition – as though life begins at nine and pauses at five, resuming only when the office lights are extinguished. But in the house of my childhood, there was no such division.
I did not then understand that I was being shaped. I thought I was merely growing.
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When I first entered an office in Sri Lanka, I carried their disciplines with me, though I did not yet recognise them as inheritance.
The room was long and rectangular, its ceiling fans turning with weary resolve. Files rested in metal cabinets that groaned when opened. Senior clerks and supervisors spoke in voices that carried both authority and resignation. I was young – young enough to believe that effort alone would be noticed.
What I discovered instead was hierarchy.
Hierarchy has its own choreography. Who speaks first. Who pauses longest. Who signs last. I learned to read silences. I learned that competence must be accompanied by tact. I learned that work was not only about tasks but about navigating temperament.
At first, I mistook my diligence for virtue. I thought that if I smiled, I would secure a kind of protection. But offices are not temples. They are theatres of ambition, insecurity, and occasionally kindness.
Work did not simply occupy my time. It began shaping my perception of people.
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Dubai arrived like a glare – brighter, harsher, unapologetically modern.
The desert has a way of stripping illusion. Buildings rise quickly, fortunes shift, identities are remade in air-conditioned rooms. I joined as a telex operator, transmitting messages across continents. The machine chattered in code, indifferent to nationality or nostalgia.
In those early evenings, when the workday ended and the city settled into neon, I felt the peculiar isolation of the expatriate. One is surrounded by movement yet privately suspended. Festivals came and went. Family voices arrived through telephone lines thinned by distance.
I told myself this was sacrifice. But sacrifice for what? For proof?
Promotion followed in measured increments. A new designation. A broader portfolio. Recognition that I had once believed would feel transformative. Yet each elevation carried an invisible demand: more time surrendered, more attention divided.
There is a subtle intoxication in responsibility. You begin to believe that the organisation depends uniquely on you. Emails multiply. Meetings lengthen. You mistake indispensability for identity.
It is a dangerous confusion.
For a period, I introduced myself not by name but by role. The title came first, the man second. And in doing so, I had quietly allowed work to colonise my sense of self.
Migration to Australia brought a different reckoning.
In Sydney, legitimacy was earned anew. Accent marked you. Experience required translation. You worked not merely to succeed but to belong. Work became the bridge between origin and acceptance.
But this time, I was a father.
And children are unsparing observers.
They notice absence more acutely than achievement. They do not measure your worth by performance reviews. They measure it by attendance – at school assemblies, at bedtime conversations, at the small, unrepeatable moments that stitch childhood together.
There were evenings when I returned home carrying the fatigue of decisions made under fluorescent light. Yet a child would ask a simple question – about homework, about the world – and I would feel the quiet accusation of divided attention.
Once, my daughter asked me what I did all day. I began to explain – meetings, decisions, responsibilities. She listened politely, then asked what I did that was fun. I had no answer.
It was then that the arithmetic shifted.
What was the value of advancement if it cost presence? What was the point of stability if it hollowed intimacy?
Work had given me mobility. Life demanded alignment.
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There came moments when I stepped away from roles others might have considered enviable. Colleagues spoke of risk. Of prudence. Of the virtue of endurance.
But endurance, I had come to understand, is not always wisdom. Sometimes it is fear disguised as loyalty.
I did not leave because I despised the work. I left because I recognised its capacity to absorb me entirely. And I wished to remain visible – to myself, to my family, to the life unfolding beyond conference rooms and business class travels.
This was not rebellion. It was recalibration.
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Now, when people ask about my “working life,” I hesitate at the phrase.
Work was never separate. It entered my character through my father’s ironed shirts. It steadied itself through my mother’s careful budgeting. It travelled with me across deserts and oceans. It matured in boardrooms and softened in living rooms.
If there is wisdom in the years behind me, it is this: the danger is not labour. The danger is substitution – allowing work to replace the very life it is meant to support.
When the emails cease, when the titles are archived, when the offices forget your name – what remains is not the designation.
What remains is whether, in the midst of earning a living, you remembered to live.
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