I did it!! I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering. I walked the stage on May 11th.
There is so much to say about the anticipation of walking on that stage, and when I did it, it felt empty. Like I just walked. All it took was four years. I remember picking the school about four years ago with the determination to be as far away from home as possible—I didn’t care if the color was maroon and burnt orange, and I didn’t care about the appearance of the campus. Four years ago, I started something new, something that would test the bounds of what holds me together. Something new that I am still learning to embrace. So here goes that something new.
Hello,
My name is Khadijat Oyediran, and I want to ask a frank question. When do people accept that being old doesn’t mean being wise? It might sound like an insult to the cultural institution of respecting your elders, but it shouldn’t be. Old is subjective—everyone is older than someone else, even if it’s by minutes. The beautiful luxury of grey-silver hair doesn’t equate to the intellectual capacity encompassed in wisdom. On the contrary, as a beautiful Yoruba proverb would say—I am not doing it justice through the English translation—a child could never and will never have clothes like an elderly person. Clothes, in this case, are eloquently used as a metaphor for wisdom, knowledge, etc. So who is to say that old, better yet, older (for those literally older), doesn’t mean wisdom?
One of the ways I navigate the world with that question at the back of my mind is through interactions with my parents. Both born in the 1900s, raising three kids born in the late 1900s, specifically 1999 to the mid-2000s. Their version of life is different, it has to be. From regulations to cultural dynamics that have taken the world by surprise—not to break the norms of society or disrupt them, but to advantageously question the integrity of the world. My father, born in Iseyin, Oyo State, Nigeria, in 1965, would confidently say, “When I was 6 years old, I was a bricklayer.” Statements like that would come out when his three kids tested his patience. You see, his version of old and wisdom is always working, never taking a vacation break even if you desperately need it, and always, always thinking of your opinion as the arbitrary law of the land, the home. However, having a daughter born in 2002 should have changed his opinion. It hasn’t. It hasn’t because wisdom is attached to age, the difference in age already proving that culturally agreed-upon consensus on wisdom. But if you were born in a different decade, era, or century (what a beautiful life lived), is that wisdom still relevant in a new decade, era, or better yet, century? My personal opinion is that wisdom is the lies we tell each other to prove a point. We aren’t wise; we are just learning to be better. We know history, our job is to never repeat history. Is that true, though?