Providence

Providence. I have heard this word used over and over again since my early childhood. I have never bothered to look up what it means. I have inferred it of course from the context in which it is often used, phrases like 'divine providence' or 'Gods providence'. It also helps that it kind of sounds like the word provide so I guess it easy to make the connection and assume that if means something along the lines of being given/provided something by someone.

Well I looked it up today and it turns out that the words 'divine' and 'God's' are kind of redundant in those phrases I mentioned earlier. According to google's new dictionary (which will inevitable become the standard for all word definitions), providence is defined thus:

Synonyms:
noun: foresight, forethought, prudence
Providence is God, or a force which is believed by some people to arrange the things that happen to us

Correct me if I'm wrong, but according to this, providence IS God (or a force), and He is not giving/providing you with anything, he is 'arranging the things that happen to us'. Well I'm sad that I have, for most of my life, had the wrong understanding of a word that has been such a staple in the conversations around me. I'm glad however to see that it represents exactly what I am excited about right now: Gods ability to plan out our live so perfectly that we marvel at the outcomes even with the benefit of hindsight.

I have been through a roller-coaster ride of a recruiting process to say the least. Up until march of 2009 I was comfortable in the knowledge that I had a full time job offer from a major Wall street firm. I could see the plan coming together, go to New York, earn your strips in a hellish environment for two years, pay your student loans and parley the name of the company and the experience into a great career in Africa focused private equity. Then the sky came crashing down with one phone call. Suddenly I had no Job, no way to pay my student loans, no way to guarantee my stay in the US, and an impending graduation that would surely user in a period of doom and distraction. My grand scheme was in a tailspin and it took everything calm down and not throw in towel.

Almost a year later, I can confidently say that that call was one of the best things that has ever happened to me. It enabled me to free myself from a job that I would be miserable doing for 2 years while keeping my large signing bonus and corporate scholarship which were integral to my being able to finish school and contingent on my accepting a full time offer with the company. It gave me the chance to spend an extra semester in the university I love the most (UT Austin), it gave me a chance to keep working with the RSC foundation and help another African student attend my Alma mater and it gave me the opportunity in the American city I love the most (Austin, TX!). I couldn't see it then but God was arranging things in a way that I could never have understood at the time. Thank God for Providence. Thank God for God ;)

Addiction

Addiction is a strange phenomenon. It can happen in so many different ways to so many different things. It easier to understand the addictions that have been found to be the result of actual physiological changes in the brain such as smoking and the increase of nicotine receptors. I find the purely psychological addictions a lot more disturbing and frightening. The fact that a human being could be caused or forced, to do something that he really rationally does not want to do and that he know he will regret after he has done is understandable. It only becomes bizarre when the person doing the forcing is the same one being forced. This internal battle that is every bit as real as battle between two human beings but more deadly because at least in a fist fight one of you can run away thus avoiding the consequences of a confrontation. One can't very well run away from one self. Thats the scariest thing about addiction. The inescapably of it all. When struggling with addiction, there is always a fight, there is always a winner, and there is always a looser. Worst of all, there is always another fight to come. If Milan Kundera is to believed, this endless cycle of battles with addiction is exactly what gives addiction so much weight in our lives. The fact that we know that we will meet this adversary again and again and that the outcome of this battle affects the outcome of the next makes it more difficult to carry the burden of addiction.

I wonder what is to be done about it. We can't give in, one of the things that makes us humans is our ability to choose what we want to do. Free will is a cornerstone of what it means to be human. Man was not meant to be a slave, not to another man and certainly not to oneself. In the slavery that is addiction there is no escape, there is no underground railroad. There is only insurrection, the slave must rise up, take up arms and overthrow the master, that is his/her only hope of redemption. But in his weekend state, battered and bruised by past battles he can not do it alone. He must look up, reach up find the helping had that awaits there, join forces with his helper, then and only then will there be hope for a new beginning.

After a three year hiatus, I wonder what has changed

My life is a series of close calls, constantly punctuated by 'almost disaster' after 'almost disaster': a last minute trip to the embassy followed by a hurried take off to an unknown land, a summer internship without which an entire year of college would have been rendered useless, a last minute deferment of fees, a hurried one hour registration for classes. Close calls at the bus stop, close calls at the airport, close calls all around. I wonder whether these close calls stress me out of invigorate me, I know that I have often felt that my life would be intolerably boring where it not for the continuous current of perils that have beset me. I look back on the last 5 years of my life and can clearly see that the most uncertain of times are also the times when I felt most alive. It almost as if there is an adrenaline surge in my system as my survival instincts kick in and suddenly I can put a lot of things that seemed so important into perspective.

I often joke that if I had been given the opportunity to plan my life I would have learned absolutely nothing. Thats because I would never have purposeful planed peril into my life, and without peril and the attending opportunity to over come it, it is difficult to see which important life lessons I would currently have in my arsenal. I hope you don't misunderstand me though, I am in no way bemoaning my life as some singularly troubled experience. I am very well aware of the fact that I am probably in the most fortunate 5% of the worlds population as far as opportunities for self direction and self development goes. As a good friend of mine once said, 'If God were to put all the worlds troubles into one pot then redistribute them equally, I would be begging Him to give me back my own troubles'. I am simply saying that I have had man a time when I felt like my life was quickly spinning out of control, and those have turned out to be some of the richest times in my life.

Does it therefor make sense that if still get that jolt of anxiety whenever I am faced with a new challenge? Even when the challenge at hand is minuscule in comparison to what I have over come so far, I still get flustered at the possibility of failure. I wonder if it is because with each of my past successes I have gain something new to worry about loosing. Let me explain: when I was worried about getting into a good high school, I was primarily concerned about doing dad proud by attending his High School Alma Marta. Where I to fail, I could always go to another high school and do just fine. Contrast that with failing to get a job post college graduation, now failure means wasting a very expensive college education, creating financial burdens for people who have already given so much for me, inability to give back to those who supported me or give forward to other who may need me. Loss of a pear group that I have grown accustomed to and even possible deportation. Maybe all this things, all these responsibilities keep raising the stakes just enough to ensure that when the next close call comes around I will be just as anxious about it as the last one