“All good things come to those who wait.”—Old Testament
People always want to be in total control of life. We want things to go our way. There’s nothing wrong with that. We feel more secure that way. We want things to go according to plan.
Real life, however, is a bit more complicated. So often, we get ourselves into all sorts of trouble because our priorities are upside down. What we believe is good for us is eating us up. We don’t know how to let go. Or what Norman Vincent Peale calls, “cooperating with the inevitable.”
This is what happened to someone I know whom I will call Rex. At a very young age, Rex had it all planned out. After high school, he wanted to be financially independent. He fought with his parents for his freedom. And he got estranged from his brothers and sisters. He had a strong entrepreneurial drive, and dynamism and stamina. He worked in a law office by day and went to class after work. He paid for his own board and lodging. He finished college on his own. After graduation, he envisioned himself having his own business by age 25, getting rich and being a millionaire, and retiring at the age of 35 and move on to something else.
He did get to own his business at 25 and was able to make it flourish. But by the time he was 35, he couldn’t retire as planned because the business went awry. He used some of the earnings to cover some personal expenses. By that time he had become a health wreck. He was suffering from a defect in his spinal column, he was in constant pain and worse, he was diagnosed to have developed a rheumatic heart, which meant he could not do any stressful work. He eventually had to give up his business and sold it for a couple of a million pesos.
So with that, he became a millionaire. But that was not the end of it. The buyer eventually found out that he lied to them about the assets and they filed a case against him. So the money he got was spent to pay for his legal defense.
Indeed, Rex had it all worked out and he pushed himself to the limit to get what he wanted at a certain point in time. But at what cost? He worked 12 hours a day. His office was his home. He never was able to have a social life. In fact, he lost many friends because of his “greed “ for money and his obsession with business. He was afraid to go home because there was no family there to go home to. He had poor social skills and eventually, many of his top people left him because they never felt that he was interested in their welfare.
He and his best friend who was the chief accountant had a falling out. An unfair labor practice case was filed by his friend. To ease his conscience, he went to church on Sundays, alone, of course. During Christmas, he went to orphanages to give food and old clothes to the orphans. All by his lonesome self.
I am reminded of that Thomas à Kempis phrase about “the man who gains the whole world but loses his own soul.” That was Rex, the man who planned out everything about his “success.” He was too rigid about it. Too focused and obsessed in fact, he forgot everything else and everyone else. He never was able to experience the joy of life. And the tragedy about it, when I last talked to him, he didn’t know what hit him. He was blaming everybody else, calling them “traitors.” He felt betrayed by everyone.
Rex did not realize that life does not go exactly the way you plan it. It is more complicated than that. And more fluid, more unexpected and more surprising. Sometimes, when we try too hard, we make a mess of the whole thing. We cannot make it all turn out perfectly.
Plan by all means. But make room for the unexpected and what cannot be controlled. Life has a way of working things out. Those who believe that there is an invisible hand at work in mysterious ways, those who have faith and who believe that there is a power that is moving events and people, they tend to flow more freely with what life gives them.
Someone named Benjamin Hoff wrote about this:
“Things just happen in the right way, at the right time. At least they do when you let them, when you work with the circumstances instead of saying ‘this isn’t supposed to be happening this way,’ and trying hard to make it happen some other way.”
For everything in life is matter of pacing and rhythm. We wait for an idea to develop and evolve. We wait for a relationship to grow before we decide that it is right. We wait for children to grow and develop their inclinations and aptitude. We wait for the seasons to change. We wait for plants to grow. We wait to bring things to a fruition. Nothing bears fruit without a period of waiting.
And that’s the sad thing about Rex. He wanted to force the issue, so to speak. He wanted things to happen in his own time as per his plan, even when the moment was not right or due. But then the plan to set himself up for life take a precipitous unexpected turn in another direction when he is confronted by health and legal issues.
He never came to think that if things do not go as planned, it might just turn out to be a great blessing, a push in a new direction, or the beginning of an unexpected success. I believe this because it happened to me, many times.
Perhaps, I should have shared this to Rex as a friendly advice. But he was too obsessed about pursuing his plan to be independently rich. He wouldn’t have listened anyway.
“The culture of the late ’90s was a gold rush mentality of greedy frenzy. People were certain they risked failure if they took time to eat dinner with their families, go for a leisurely Saturday bike ride or read a book just for fun. They were utterly focused on constant progress. People in the ’90s worshipped the god of speed—anything worth doing was worth doing fast.”
The lure of progress, success, money and fame created a wave of contagion. You needed to get on board: don’t wait, don’t stop. Just like the alcoholic. Just like the “addictive mind.”
—Speed: Facing Our Addiction to Fast and Faster—and Overcoming Our Fear of Slowing Down, Stephanie Brown