The Most Valuable Lesson Life Has Taught Me
The truth is, most Nigerians students carry a mental calculator about their life. There’s an unspoken, holy pact that we live by: be 18 when admitted, be 22 when you graduate, be 23 when you've done NYSC, and be working and earning well by 24.
To my deep embarrassment, for a long period, my life looked like a perfectly ordered spreadsheet in my mind.
Unfortunately for me, life… doesn't really understand spreadsheets. So, the best and most valuable lesson life has schooled me in is radical adaptability, which is the art of changing shape to match the rain that it's falling you.
It wasn't a grand triumph with a swelling soundtrack. It was a story about experiencing the ultimate dread every student in a Nigerian federal university fears – prolonged ASUU strikes.
A painful situation, most likely. It was my third year, my timetable was perfectly on track when the academic axe fell.
Weeks turned into months, which then began marching toward a whole year. Initially like the rest of us, I called it a "forced holiday." As the months kept adding up and my peers at the more fortunate private universities were still progressing, a suffocating fear started to creep in.
On top of the academic standstill came the agonizing pangs of sapa-a Nigerian slang term for crippling poverty.
The Nigerian economy was tanking, inflation had eaten up all our savings, and even then, my Dad was struggling to breathe under the weight of supporting his family.
I spiralled into a period of depression, feeling like I had failed at being an adult and that my entire future was draining away. Mostly, I stayed inside my room, resenting the government, the school system, the world. However, the tipping point didn't come from an epiphany of my own, but from someone dear to my heart: my aunt. My auntie is what the Yorubas would call "a market woman of the people"-her entire existence speaks of resilience and resourcefulness.
On a sunny Tuesday morning, she literally came to pull me out of my room, where I was wallowing in self-pity. "Come help me o!", she just said, and in a flash, I was walking alongside her toward the busy, chaotic market, where she had her small stall. The morning was bright and cloudless when we arrived.
As if on cue, like typical Nigerian weather, the heavens opened up about an hour later and it started raining-not a drizzle, but a "wash-everything-away-in-seconds" torrential downpour.
I froze. Surely all of her hard work and wares were about to be washed away, and all that awaited was despair and weeping. But amazingly, my auntie, like a magician, pulled a huge, durable tarp from behind her stall and quickly covered everything up. Not just that, she suddenly grabbed another sack from behind the stall and, in the midst of the scramble for cover, started selling off the cheap umbrellas inside it to the stranded commuters at double the price.
While I was pitying the potential loss of revenue, she was turning it into a profit. On our wet ride home on a packed "danfo" bus, while I was stuffing myself with a surprisingly large purse of money, she looked at me and dropped this line in pidgin English which resonated in my soul: "Pikin, if road close, you no go stand dey cry for gate. You go find window, or you break the wall."
And just like that, it hit me like the rainstorm. The entire situation was not the fault of the collapsed educational system; I was in fact resisting the way life flows by being rigid. I was an ice block, in a flowing river. I should have been the current.
This lesson reshaped my thinking. I stopped waiting for the government to solve my problems.
If the front door toformal education was locked, I would simply break the window for self-learning.
Using the very small amount of mobile data I could afford, I dived into digital skills such as graphic design and freelance writing. I stopped complaining about the faulty generator. It was in the pitch dark night that I discovered my inner bibliophile, lit only by my dim, rechargeable lamp. I stopped mourning what I had and began furiously searching for what I could have.
My timetable had crumbled, but I wasn't finished.
By the time the strike ended, I was already a fully functioning freelancer, augmenting my father's earnings the best way I could.
I apply my lesson of adaptability to everything. If a lecturer suddenly throws me an unexpected change to the syllabus the day before a major examination, I don’t panic.
I change my study strategy.
If fuel scarcity doubles the transportation fees, I calmly review my finances and look for affordable alternative transport options without getting distraught. The world around me is not, and will never be, perfect. There will always be macroeconomic challenges and unforeseen government decisions. There will always be events happening that I cannot control.
Life, will keep throwing curveballs at me, but thanks to my aunt's wisdom and her market stall, I know for a fact that my reaction to these events is within my control.
True achievement isn’t in navigating a perfectly smooth journey; it's about knowing how to tack when the winds hit you unexpectedly.
Life is a difficult and often painful teacher. But because I experienced that rainstorm and listened to the words that followed, I am no longer afraid of the shower. I have learned how to swim; I have learned how to be water.
I invite @peacemike @okereblessing and @bossj23
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