Dipika Kohli
By Dipika Kohli
You don’t know what you could become tomorrow, a year from now, or ten. You don’t know what might happen if x or y event occurred. Or didn’t. At every moment there are a zillion things that could change, that could happen, that could switch it up in unbelievable, undreamable ways. To acknowledge this mystery is part of changing. My to-do lists have a lot of blank lines, for filling in later, when pertinent information comes in. I know it’s not completely comfortable to plan for uncertainty, but that’s been an outsize part of how I design the next chapters, personally. I wouldn’t have ever planned to go abroad three times in wildly different cultures (Ireland, Japan, Cambodia), but there you have it. You don’t know what you don’t know. Mm. Let’s talk about the knowns and unknowns in life.
Known: Things you can pretty much count on because of the laws of physics, for example. Sun will rise tomorrow: of this, we can be pretty sure.
Unknown: When we have an intuition, a gut feeling about something, and for sure enough, it turns out to be true.
Known unknowns: Things you are quite sure that you have zero idea about. Is there life after death? Are there other life forms in the universe?
Unknown unknowns: No idea.
Examining, we see there are things we know, and, of course, things we don’t know, co-existing right now, in this moment. Things we may forget, or items we’ll change our mind about.
Stuff you may discover later that you were flat-out wrong about, of course, too. Many self-help books or articles can outline this for us. Self-awareness is a thing. (Anyone who has a close friend of any length of time knows that there will be moments you have to own up to your part in creating rifts because you were oh-so-sure about something that, it turned out, you were completely inaccurate on.) Perceptions, interpretations, so much one could say. I’m not an expert. Ego is another topic, but we’ll leave that to the side.
I saw this movie, Journey to a Billion Suns, at a planetarium in Kuala Lumpur, a few years ago. That was a pretty fun, happened-upon, gem of a find on an outing that was deliberately left unplanned. Yet, there we were, entertained, curiosity piqued and immersed in expansiveness. I recall how they said we are moving around in space, that galaxies are zipping around at speeds we can’t fathom. Which might be why, when it comes to making checklists, for me, there’s the last category I mentioned above that I give a very large degree of attention to. Unknown unknowns.
When on occasion, I get the opportunity to work with someone new on a design gig, it takes a little while to build rapport, but we can, and do, and then we go towards this same box. A potentiality section. Who do you want to be, next? How do you want to feel?
I’ll talk a lot. To just a few, though. I will share notes from memory, recorded in various notebooks. I’ll say, ‘Anything is possible’ or ‘Expand your window’ or ‘See what you might discover, one step at a time, as you go.’ Stuff like that. It doesn’t always land, of course, because it’s hard to go against what is so deeply entrenched as a way of thinking, namely, follow the group, or stay in your lane. Ideas, but more importantly, space for new things, is hard to talk about, sometimes. Societies condition us not to do this.
But, with space, high quality and informed by reflective moments that with practice become a habit to make room for, we could learn more deeply about each other, and ourselves. With pause, some insight may fall into our laps. That can illuminate the unknown unknowns for a flash moment. Fill the blank spaces of our notebooks, where we can hold them comfortably, and revisit, if we choose to, from time to time. Questioning our choices can and does happen, of course. Having a deep reservoir of insights can help us avoid this.
‘Know thyself,’ as they say.
In my case, ‘they’ were one of my most elderly relatives along with his card-playing peers. In my twenties I hung out with them over a winter, when I was coming up with checklists. But, and this is how I’d become the way I am today about everything, they advised me not to go too fast towards—or invest too heavily in— things that I might regret. Things that weren’t my idea. Take your time, they said, to figure out what matters to you. To ask, ‘Who am I?’ My new checklists, optimized to help discern these, have been with me, ever since.
Dipika Kohli is an author who is based in Phnom Penh. Discover her books at kismuth.com and other projects at dipikakohli.com.
