The wild wonderful
Work, life choices, and all the things...
what I’m up to
I’ve been abysmal this past month and a half in providing updates - partly for so much happening at once and partly because I was waiting for things to happen enough to announce. Now, I can!
About four weeks ago, I took up the role of teaching business communications at a business school here in Phnom Penh. My life since then has been full of lesson planning and strategizing, teaching, getting used to the business school and its educational model, and getting to know my students. So far I am absolutely loving it, although waking up early in order to traverse the city and be awake and energetically enough to teach a 7:30 AM class as a night owl rather than a morning person has been challenging. It was also pretty fantastic to receive a paycheck after 5 months again.
Besides taking on this role I am also excited to be speaking at an event this weekend, “Strategic Position in Digital Marketing,” on brand and the importance of language in your brand strategy and communications materials. If you are in Phnom Penh, check it out!
Besides this, I strive to still maintain time to attend events around the city, spend with friends, volunteer, read a little bit more again, and for mus
I’ve also resumed my Khmer lessons and am thoroughly enjoying those each week!
What I’m thinking about and learning
My visa in Cambodia has now been extended for another year—another thing I’m relieved and pleased to have clarity on. Somehow I’m already in a next and entirely unplanned second year of life here. It is wild and wonderful to me that at the moment my life is nothing like what I could possibly have imagined it to be. I’m teaching my students at the moment about personal development and planning for their professional life and my own is such an illustration of how winding and fascinating a life can be. Certainly full of the unexpected, which can lead to the wildly wonderful when we are open to it.
On the flip side, with the past month and a half, the reality of living as far away as possible from people I never liked living far from at all in the first place has also settled in. Choosing to stay here—not because of what I get in staying (which is yay!) but for what I miss out on as a result (like being close to siblings or meeting new nibblings or friends and life in other worlds of mine)—is achingly hard in some ways. My newest nephew was born this weekend and I don’t know when I will get to meet him or see that sister and brother-in-law again. Assessing my skills/abilities for jobs and what I want to actually do and analyzing them against a risk matrix and the backdrop of what is possible, plausible, and profitable (enough) is challenging - and in taking on this new teaching role I walked away from potentially another amazing opportunity. How do we know we are making the right decisions? (I think we don’t usually get to know; we just have to make it so.) Watching friends go through major decisions of their own or experience really challenging surprises - both friends here in Phnom Penh and friends far flung across the globe and not being able to be there with them is also hard.
But amid the good, bad, and ugly is a little nugget of truth revealing itself to me - that perhaps the thing I dread most in all the world is the idea of stagnancy; of reaching a point of no further movement. Of giving up on exploring and missing out on the wild wonder of the beyond.
What I’m reading
I’ve managed to finish two delightful, light reading mysteries - Agatha Christie’s The Big Four, and Kerry Greenwood’s Raisins & Almonds from her Phryne Fisher series I so adore. I also finished beta reading a friend’s novel and I am so excited by what that will look like when it gets through to publication. I laughed, I cried, I snorted - so let’s just say the final version is going to be phenomenal!
Besides course text-books, my current read is Axie Oh’s The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea, which so far is quite lyrically exquisite.
What I’m making
I’m making course work! It’s fascinating to take elements I’ve learned from developing intensive job trainings and on-boarding from my first job; curriculum development/course management from contracting with USAID; and other trainings, seminars, workshops, classes, panel discussions, and capacity-building activities from volunteering, grad school, or jobs over the years and actually piece together a semester-long course for 2nd year BA-degree students. I don’t have tons of time for other work, but creating this is pretty epic and all I need at the moment!
As a kid, I don’t remember wishing I could see relatives more so much as wishing I felt known and seen and cared about in general. For the record, I think you do that with your nibblings. You may not be there for the daily nitty gritty, but you probably wouldn’t even if you weren’t in Cambodia, and ultimately I don’t think that’s the biggest factor in kids feeling loved or connected. Everybody knows you and gets excited when Auntie Magu pops onto a screen, and none of them begrudge you time in Cambodia or anywhere else. This newest one will be similar, I’m sure, and one day, like my older ones, he will thrill to hear your stories.
Love you and so proud of you, Professor Marie! A lot of people expect to change the world but get knocked over by how different life ends up being. You meet each new wave with grace and grit and you change the world in many small ways over time because of it. Keep being you in a world that is better for it.