For One Day, We Left Work Behind

Some days at work when you get some time to interact and socialise with your colleagues you realise that your colleagues are actually human beings outside the emails, meetings, deadlines and professional conversations you are constantly having with them, especially for a corporate institution like mine and it was in the middle of the conversation about how stressful work has been that we organised an office retreat . For once, nobody is really thinking about who has a pending task, who needs to send an email or what meeting is coming up next. You just get to relax, laugh and enjoy the company of people you normally only see in a professional setting.
That was probably my favourite thing about this office retreat. It gave everyone a chance to loosen up a little. At the office, there is always that professional boundary. You greet each other, discuss work, attend meetings and go back to your desks. Even when you get along with someone, there is still a certain level of formality because, at the end of the day, you are colleagues but take everyone out of the office and put them somewhere where there is nothing particularly serious to discuss, and suddenly everything changes. People start joking more. The quiet colleagues like me become surprisingly loud. The people who normally look completely serious at work are suddenly laughing at the most ridiculous things. You hear stories you probably would never hear during a normal working day, and you discover sides of people that you didn't even know existed.
That was the height of it of the retreat for me. It felt like we had temporarily taken off our professional identities. I think we sometimes underestimate how much we need moments like that. Work can become very repetitive when every day revolves around responsibilities. You wake up, get ready, commute to the office, work for several hours and eventually go home. Then you repeat the same thing the next day. Somewhere in that routine, it is easy to forget that the people sitting around you are people you can actually have fun with.
The retreat broke that routine, for a few hours, we weren't just colleagues dealing with professional responsibilities. We were simply a group of people enjoying ourselves. The funny part came at the end of the day. One by one, everyone started leaving and i think i was one of the last people to leave. The people who had spent the entire day enjoying themselves gradually disappeared and suddenly i realised that the same place has become quiet again.
Most of the people in that video have since moved on from the office. Some have gone to different jobs, some have taken completely different paths, and life has simply continued moving. When I look back at that video now, that part almost feels more significant than the retreat itself. At the time, we were just having fun nobody was thinking about who would leave first or how different our professional lives might eventually become. We were simply enjoying one of those rare days when work didn't really feel like work.
At the end of it all, in the corporate world everyone goes their separate ways. Well, everyone except me, apparently. Lol, everyone else left the office, and somehow I am still here. 😂 It is funny how life works.