David Walker won’t just be walking across the academic quadrangle at Simon Fraser University when he accepts his Bachelor of Philosophy degree on Oct. 5, he’ll be bridging decades.
Walker, 68, first started working towards his degree 37 years ago.
But after five years of part-time studies while he built his career as a fundraiser and manager for various charitable and international aid organizations, he set aside his academic aspirations to concentrate on life — raising his family, traveling to 50 countries for work and running marathons.
He was just seven credits shy of his degree.
Even after the Coquitlam resident retired two years ago, the thought of picking up the remainder of his courses didn’t occur to him.
Instead, he focussed on some other life goals, 32 of them to be exact. Among them:
• defying an incurable chronic kidney disease with which he’d been recently diagnosed;
• writing three books and 300 poems;
• and collecting T-shirts from 12 marathons in 12 countries.
It was his wife who suggested he pursue his long-neglected degree.
And so, at the age of 66, Walker the runner walked back into a classroom at SFU and settled in with a cohort of much younger students. They immediately dubbed him “Grampa.”
Walker discovered while much was different in academia, nothing had changed.
His fellow students were just as eager to argue and reason about truth as he had been in his 20s — and still is, as a matter of fact.
“I was allowed to be able to show them how it works, how truth settles down in real life,” said Walker. “I’ve turned over some rocks but I still have that optimism, I’m still a child of the ’60s.”
Walker said his insatiable love for learning carried him through a career that included helping with the famine in Ethiopia and rebuilding Mexico City after a devastating earthquake.
“Learning from Indigenous peoples as their community faced the recruitment of boy soldiers, girl indignities, refugee camps and other low-income challenges taught me in a well-rounded way,” Walker said.
Returning to book learning was liberating.
“Before, you’d think you could leverage your degree into a career, but that’s no longer a motivation,” Walker said. “It lays that goal down and allows me to start on so many other goals.”
Including some new ones, like accepting his degree in front of some of his eight grandchildren and, hopefully, motivating them to pursue lifelong learning.
Said Walker: “If you can find a source of learning that gives you great joy, you’ll live a life of awe."
Spoken like a philosopher.
