…it was in the work that she came closest to finding herself, by which we don’t mean “self-knowledge” or understanding one’s “true nature” but rather how at some point you can see most plainly that this is what you do, this is how you fit in the wider ecology; in the way she felt fine-tuned, most thoroughly alive, for she could gauge the hardness and pH and trace salinity simply by how it played between her fingers, how it tingled her cheek; she could tell by how the fish were schooling whether they were hungry or stressed or content. And if all of us thought of our work more like this, wouldn’t we be better off?

Lee, Chang-rae. On Such a Full Sea: A Novel. NY: Riverhead Books, 2014.