Dipika Kohli
By Dipika Kohli
If you happen to be finding yourself in transition, here is a thought. How we choose our choices is partly based, apparently, on something experts call ‘decision by experience.’ So, in other words, your gut knows what to do, your heart of hearts has a strong hunch about what’s best. Reflecting on what you have already done clues you in about where you’d like to go in the future.
This is why every so often I think it’s important to look deeply, to recall things that have happened, and plan a little bit.
Time for me to start new things. What, exactly, does that look like? It’s anybody’s guess for now, but it could become quite obvious, if I just give myself a chance to glance backwards, to see where I am, and what was noteworthy, on earlier journeys.
Cooler weather here in Phnom Penh, like today’s soft rains, perhaps, are what set me off on this kind of introspection. Rain is nice. It is comforting, and encouraging, to have patters of the familiar. I’m reminded of other big, transitional points in life. One was Southwest Ireland. After three years of soaking in the truly grass-is-always greener pastures of West Cork, I felt it: time to go.
My handful of newspaper and graphic design gigs were not half bad, as they’d say over there. Yet, I felt myself questioning my place. Next thing you know, I was in Seattle.
More newspapers, and more design gigs. Seasons came and went, and, when the time came to leave, it simply did. I went back to North Carolina. Seemed so easy to zigzag around, back then. If that’s the case, then why does moving around seem so daunting, now? Am I not the kind of person who just starts new things, sight unseen, to see what happens when I get there? Yes, I was.
Now, I know there are drawbacks to this way of going about things, unplanned and kinda flighty; yet, I also know that when you think you have things ‘lined up’ you can be sorely disappointed. Pros and cons of both attitudes get weighed now, for me, as I design my next(s).
Irish rain, Seattle rain, and now, Cambodia’s monsoons. Closing my eyes, I try to picture it. What’s next?
For one, more English. I miss speaking in native English with native English speakers. Or so I say. But I’d like to think being in that situation would mean that I could fall into conversational exchanges of the sort I miss from the Ireland and US days. Me, hosting salons and roundtables, getting occasional gigs to buoy these efforts in, go figure, newspapers and design.
Can I find that, again? Can I locate a convivial atmosphere like pubs in Skibbereen (Tsar on Main Street comes to mind) or the cafes in Seattle (not Joe Bar, sadly, as I read somewhere it’d closed). Will I miss this Southeast Asia ‘everyday simple,’ though? I can blend in, quietly enough, and do my own thing, like compose these esoteric, philosophical meanders and send them to Saathee. Or will I be told to ‘Get serious, and get a job, Dipika. Writing is nice, and I like your writing, and it can be your forever on-the-side hobby.’ Probably. But I’ll just go, ‘What?’
Because there’s a thing that happens at a certain stage of doing a thing you do because you can’t help doing it. You stop caring what other people think.
Time to go. Maybe it’ll be good to visit a few places. Check them out. Assess opportunities. Or is this wishful thinking, to assume I can slot right back in to a society I left, and not have any culture shock whatsoever? With acculturation, on my part, here, it will be an ‘adjustment,’ to say the least, to return to a trendy, ‘busy’ American life in some city, or even back in the Triangle, if that’s where next becomes. I don’t know.
I think there’s a lot of pressure on those of us who are born into a degree of privilege to make good on that and be something, something important, and to quote unquote succeed.
The story of my life is that I move around. Perhaps that’s all I need to remember. That when it is time, it’s time. It’s a given, that I will, no doubt, one day shift locations. More newspapers and design gigs? Conversation parties? Perhaps, perhaps. Let me investigate.
Dipika Kohli is an author who is based in Phnom Penh. Discover her books at kismuth.com and other projects at dipikakohli.com.
