Article

Culture

Identity

Psychology

Work

7 February 2025

5 min read

Even the office can be a place for self-discovery

What the office makes us feel about ourselves

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

A model of an office desk and shelves, at which a green plastic person sits leaning into the desk.

Igor Omilaev on Unsplash.

The realisation strikes me as I wrestle to fit my key into the lock on my office door: today I have no memory whatsoever of my journey into work. At my usual time I left the house and got in my car. I drove my usual route to my usual parking space and hopefully I stopped for all the red lights – but in truth I can’t remember any of them. Nor can I remember getting out of my car, locking my car (I hope I did that too) or walking from my parking space to this door, the lock of which is still failing to yield. This, I then realise, is because I am absent-mindedly trying to unlock it with my car key. Rolling my eyes, I reach into my pocket for the correct key… and it is not there.

Now I’m awake, glancing at my watch; 50 minutes until my first meeting of the day (online). This is enough to drive home again, but not enough to drive home, collect my key, and return to this frustrating door. By now I have established that both coat pockets are empty, so I drop to my knees and start to rummage through my bag.

It’s not a disaster if I do have to drive home, I can simply stay there and have a WFH day. I am fortunate, in my current job, to have the privilege of deciding this on a day-by-day basis. Many, I know, would love to work from home but do not have the option, but I prefer the office. The smell of black coffee, seagulls yakking on the roof. Doors open and close as colleagues come and go, keyboards tap, and on and off there is distant hum of student voices emanating from a classroom downstairs. In the hive of activity, I hum too, and I definitely get my work done more efficiently.

I’m interested to analyse this phenomenon through the lens of place attachment. There is a considerable body of research that investigates the way people feel about the spaces that they inhabit – that certain places become meaningful places to be in. Place attachment theorists explore how we can have relationships to places in much the same way that we have relationships to people – feeling a strong pull to return to the familiar, disliking change, and feeling ‘homesick’ for places where we have a strong emotional attachment. Of course, this is usually discussed in relation to the natural world, or to one’s childhood home, or ancestral lands… but why not of the office? Because the heart of place attachment is not really how we feel about places, but how places make us feel about ourselves.

Either for good or for bad, in the office one inhabits a certain sense of self – maybe not a different self to the one that we are at home – but at work, different aspects of that self are valued differently and are allowed to come to the fore. Perhaps I feel this especially because I am a working mum – it can be a relief to leave the home each day and come to inhabit a space where I am valued for more than my ability to know whether or not it’s PE today, or if there’s milk in the fridge. In the office, I can dwell in a version of myself that I enjoy – one that is paid to think and to write and to teach, a part of the university hum.

George Pitcher, in his recent article for Seen & Unseen, challenges managers to ask themselves why they are opposing more junior staff working from home. His discussion hints at this same phenomenon of places shaping identities, and Pitcher proposes that managers might resent junior staff working from home, at least in part, because they feel like their identity as a manager is compromised when they cannot sit in their glass-walled office, gazing out over the rows of worker bees, queen of all they survey. As Pitcher puts it, “…if staff aren’t in the office, then what’s the point of being a boss?”

The Bible too engages with the interplay between one’s sense of self and one’s sense of place. In the Old Testament, before the birth of Jesus, prophets and hymn writers spoke longingly of their homelands, and especially of the temple where they gathered to be assured of their identity as the people of God. “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in strange land?” cries one hymnwriter, exiled far from home, while another writes of how he longs to dwell in the House of the Lord all the days of his life. With this sentiment I can empathise; just as I feel like more of a worker-bee when I am within the hive of the university, I feel I am much more of a Christian when belting out hymns among the Sunday throng than I am among my colleagues at a Monday morning meeting.

And yet the Bible issues a challenge to me here. Because after the Old Testament comes the New, written after the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and largely after the destruction of the great “Second Temple” that Herod the Great had built in Jerusalem. With the temple gone, and the region subdued under Roman overlords, the New Testament writers make frequent allusions to Christian believers themselves being temples – temples of the Holy Spirit. This means that, as a Christian, I am urged to think of myself as a “place” of God’s presence in the world – and not just for my own sake but for the sake of others. I am not just part of the hum; I change the hum by being in it. The challenge is to gently bring the notes of my Sunday morning hymn to my Monday morning meeting.

A long time ago, when I was a little Brownie-Guide, we used to sing a campfire song called “Bees of Paradise.” It was very short and simple:

Bees of paradise, do the work of Jesus Christ

Do the work that no one can.

As a child, I never understood the words, although I enjoyed the pretty little tune that we sang it to, in the round. It comes back to me now, as I rummage in my bag for a key that I know I’m not going to find, and I return to my childhood habit of pondering the lyrics.

I’ve only got 40 minutes now until my first meeting of the day, it’s time to give up and drive home. Turning resignedly back down the stairs, I resolve to be no less a worker-bee at home than I would have been at the office today. And no less of a Christian either.

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Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.