Life is Simple,

There are times in our lives when things happen differently from what we have either planned or expected. Sometimes, we react wrongly to the frustrations and eventually bounced off tangent from our original intened path or direction. I guess the reason for all of these is that we do not really have full control of all the things that evolve in our lives, from childhood till parenthood.

I remember having planned my life while in college, after the Diliman Commune in January 1971 and after i joined a college fraternity. I have figured out that at 21, after college, I shall start my career at the bottom pit of the corporate hierarchy and stay 2-3 years at the most as a clerk/staff. I have to be a supervisor on my 3rd or 4th year of my professional career and spend another 2-3 years in a supervisory job and by the time I marry at age 27, I should be grooming myself to be a manager before the age of 30. I realized this when I noticed job advertisements for managerial positions always indicate an age requirement between 30-35 years old. Meaning if you do not make it in a managerial position after 35, you are a goner in the job market.

I have planned to marry at the age of 27 and marry and sire my first born to a 24 year old woman, have my first baby at 28, and have the second child 4 years later, planning for the worst that I cannot support two children at the same time going to college so the four-year space would give me a breathing spell that my first born has finished her four-year college education before the second child enters the university. Hoping for the best but planning for the worst became my personal strategy in all my future endeavours.

It would have been an ideal life that I would have coasted along at age 52 when my second child would have finished her four-year college education and hopefully would have retired from employment and started my business, with two college graduates to help me out. The reason for this is that my own mother died at age 66 and I was planning a life up to the same age, although there are reasons to wish that I live beyond 66 years.

As much as we plan our lives, life alters itself at certain points that in younger years, we look at as frustrating failures. Little do we realize when we were young that when life alters itself, it is actually God changing your life direction, regardless how well meaning and how well we plan our lives.

To be able to discern this, we would have established a very close personal relationship with our God and usually, this happens ony after a series of setbacks and we are left with no other recourse except Divine Mercy and Providence. Then and only then we realize our human limits and accept the will of God.

When life alters itself, we should look at it as an opportunity to know ourselves and acknowledge the wisdom of the reasons why we get off-tangent from our human aspirations. At this point, we should start accepting the Divine Will of God in our lives and discern these more as a benediction for our human imperfections from our God.