I am reading Le Guin again. The Dispossessed – my favourite of her books. In the strange limbo of relocating to a new city, it seems appropriate. It feels like home. That strange, slippery concept of home, always just beyond my grasping fingers.

In Le Guin’s fictional anarchist world, the language has only one word for work and play. They are the same word, the same thing. Today felt like that for the first time in years. It feels good to come home to the work that I love. After Korea, after so many months of doing work that was not mine. That work was work. It was counting the hours and getting through the days. It was living for the weekends when I could put on my red boots and pack my little backpack and see new places and discover new things. Or spend hours in coffee shops and bars and discover friends and acquaintances. Not that there was anything wrong with the discovering and the travel and the friends. But the work hours felt wasted. Work has always been central to who I am, to how I enter the world. I lost that for a while.

Today I felt like I had found it again. Today I sat for hours, hardly noticing time, and the words and the numbers danced and played and became the thing I wanted them to be. But not just any words and numbers. Words and numbers about the things that I know and love. Things I think about just before I sleep and when I wake up in the middle of the night. The things that engage me, like food security and development and poverty and aid. Words and numbers that are ideas made tangible. The visible parts, the bits that are useful and relevant on the page right now, but that are part of a bigger picture, of a slowly twisting whirlwind of ideas about security and poverty and development and hope.

There is a joy in doing real, hard, relevant work. Thinking work. Work that is bigger than who I am, that is part of a larger moment, part of a giant, swirling atmosphere of ideas. It feels like being connected to that ethereal whirl of ideas. Like spending a day of hard, intense work dancing in and out of that mist of thoughts to catch in your net, just the right concepts and phrases and arguments for now.

This work, the work I love, is not just a part of who I am; it is my home. This whirling unreal reality is where I live. It is where I thrive, where I find the energy to keep going, to keep doing. It is where I meet the people who excite and inspire me. It shouldn’t be called ‘work’. It should have the same name as play. It challenges and energizes and stimulates me as much as the rush and the swirl of debate.

Perhaps tomorrow I’ll feel differently. Perhaps one flurry of thoughts is only the illusion of a whirlwind. Perhaps ‘home’ is as ephemeral as that exquisite moment when all the words dance into place with a gentle sigh of peace. But that is a beautiful place. Home is an idea. It is a difficult, fleeting idea for those who have chosen against the settled comfort of suburbia. Perhaps the compensation is the thrill of an intellectual-emotional home just a wish away from the work that, if you are lucky, you do each day.