On 6 September 2012, I graduated from the University of Zambia with a degree in engineering.
There was the gown.
The photographs.
The family and friends who came to celebrate.
And the moment I walked across the stage and shook hands with the Vice-Chancellor as I received my degree.
I recently reflected on that day in The Photographs Don’t Tell the Whole Story.
It was a good day.
A few days later, when everything had become quiet again, I opened my journal and looked back at the five years that had just ended.
That is where I wrote the words at the top of this page.
University of Life Notes.
And what struck me when I found the entry fourteen years later was not what I wrote.
It was what I did not write.
What I did not think about
Five years of engineering school had been built around fairly clear expectations.
Study.
Pass.
Move to the next year.
Graduate.
I cared about all of that.
I wanted to do well academically. I graduated with a Credit, but there had been a time when I wanted a Merit. There were courses I wished I had performed better in. There were certainly moments when I could have studied harder.
But eleven days after graduating, sitting with my journal, those were not the things occupying my mind.
I did not write that I wished I had spent more time in the library.
I did not write that I wished I had obtained a higher classification.
I did not go back through my courses and think about how I could have improved my academic record.
Instead, when I looked back, I was thinking about the life that had happened while I was doing all of that.
The friendships.
Relationships and heartbreaks.
The trips.
The moments with friends when nothing important was happening and we were simply together.
Watching Prison Break and How I Met Your Mother.
Laughing about things that probably would not be funny to anyone outside the room.
Going out.
Doing what I described in the journal as silly things.
Living.
That does not mean I regretted my university life.
I did not.
By my final year, I had learned to make room for life alongside engineering. At UNZA, anyone in their fifth year of study was known as a Mafifi, and I remember that period as one of the fullest seasons of my time there.
That was the period of life I was writing about in Mafifi State of Mind.
What interested me about the journal was something else.
When the five years were over, and I was no longer inside the routine of lectures, assignments, tests and examinations, my mind did not immediately return to those things.
It went somewhere else.
What remained when the chapter ended
I think that is what caught my attention.
While we are inside something, it is easy for the thing in front of us to become the whole picture.
At university, there is always something academic to do.
After university, there is something else.
Work has its own version.
Business has its own version.
Even different seasons of the same career can become their own small universities.
There is always something to learn.
Something to improve.
Something to achieve.
Something that tells you whether you are doing well.
And there is nothing wrong with that.
I have spent much of my life pursuing those things.
But finding this old journal entry made me pause.
Because when one of those chapters ended, the things I remembered most were not necessarily the things I had spent the most time trying to achieve.
They were the things that had happened while I was pursuing them.
Perhaps that is something worth remembering while we are still in the middle of our current chapters.
Not to stop.
Not to become less ambitious.
Not to pretend that the work does not matter.
Just to occasionally remember that there is life happening while we are busy doing what we are supposed to do.
And perhaps some of the things happening alongside the main thing will one day be what we remember most about the whole period.
University of Life (UNLIF)
Eleven days after graduation, I gave the next chapter a name.
University of Life (UNLIF).
I did not know then how many different versions of it I would experience.
There would be more formal education.
Work.
Different seasons of work.
Business.
Marriage.
Friendship.
Loss.
Parenthood.
And things I still have not experienced.
Perhaps that was the point of giving it a name.
University had ended.
Learning had not.
Fourteen years later, I found the old page again.
And I think the younger version of me was reminding the current one of something simple.
As you do the work.
As you pursue what you are pursuing.
As you try to do well.
Remember to live while you are doing it.
The University of Life is still in session.