Anticipating and planning

THIS is a skill we should try to cultivate as early as
possible. It’s actually a necessity, a vital consequence of our nature
that needs to work things out instead of just waiting for things to
work out by themselves. It’s what is proper to us.

            The youth need it urgently today. Having to contend with
their raging hormones that would usually put them in shallow,
knee-jerk mode, they are now continually tickled with so many images
and other things that would keep them from seeing beyond their noses,
made worse for us since we tend as a race to have short noses.

            Sad to say, many times we allow ourselves to drift away
and to be carried away by external forces in our environment, leaving
us completely at their mercy. We obviously are conditioned by certain
elements, both inside and outside us, but we are meant to direct our
own lives too, since we are the captains of our own ships.

            We should try to avoid what is called as fatalism, that
twisted trust in a destiny that is so blind that we would feel no need
to do anything at all. Equally to be avoided is that anything-goes
attitude of many reckless and irresponsible people nowadays.

            While we are not in full control of things, we have enough
elements to warrant the practicability and practicality of this skill
of anticipating and planning. And precisely because we are not in
control of everything, we have even greater reason to develop this
skill as soon as possible.

            We just have to be careful to avoid the other extreme of
over-anticipating and over-planning such that we end up over-anxious
and worried and fall into an obsessive-compulsive syndrome,
practically converting us into control freaks. Unfortunately, we also
have quite a number of people with this kind of disorder.

            We also have to learn how to live a sense of abandonment
in the hands of God. Let’s not forget that our life is always a joint
life between God and us. It’s both God’s and ours. Relying only on one
and neglecting the other in this indispensable duality of our life
would unavoidably lead us to some trouble, if not materially, socially
or economically, then, for sure, morally and spiritually.

            With all that said, we now have to proceed to how to
cultivate this very crucial skill. We need to respect a certain
learning curve in this that will always require some big effort in the
beginning until some ease, comfort, joy and connaturality would
develop.

            Development has to go through stages arranged in some kind
of an inclined plane. In the beginning, we always need to be spoon-fed
first. We have to be asked to make some kind of daily schedule,
defining our priorities, identifying our needs and resources we can
avail of, etc.

            Obviously, when dealing with kids, we start with the most
elementary and immediate needs that are not, of course, the most
important and basic. They need to be directly supervised from always
to occasional.

            But there has to be a gradual process of letting them get
involved into more and bigger responsibilities—their studies, the use
of money and other resources, then the development of virtues like
order, prudence, temperance, fortitude, etc.

            This has to go on until they realize the greatest need to
develop their spiritual and moral life that will always be an ongoing,
till-death affair. In each stage of development, appropriate
strategies have to be devised to help them anticipate and plan their
days, weeks, months, etc.

            One basic thing to remember always is to appeal to kids’
spiritual faculties of thinking, judging and reasoning, without of
course compromising their emotional and physical needs.

            The ideal situation would be that latter faculties be made
to lead them to discover and use the former faculties and to express
what the former would indicate. There has to be some healthy unity and
harmony between the intelligence and emotions, the spiritual and the
physical aspects.

            Another thing to keep in mind is to teach kids to
distinguish between the essential and non-essential, and better if the
differences between the two be made more and more nuanced, with the
finer distinctions well-defined and appreciated.

            Let’s never forget that in all this task of cultivating
the skill of anticipating and planning, just as in all other skills we
need to develop, there’s always need to have recourse to God for
guidance and for the grace to make things happen as they should.

            Let’s hope that we can have the next generation better
equipped in this skill.