And we
answered: Be it learning, work,
chesed, taking care of the family or any combination thereof, if you are evenly
moderately organized you most probably have your day worked out in advance, as
you do every other day.
And then come
the speed bumps: flat tires, your child comes home sick from school, emergency
trips to the doctor and dentist for stitches and toothaches, a crisis at the
office which keeps you there till all hours, your chavrusa doesn’t show up,
your car doesn’t start, it snowed 23 inches, and a myriad of other
unanticipated horrors guaranteed to trash your plans.
Our
self-absorption notwithstanding, the truth is that this is a theocentric world,
which requires us to understand that what we propose to do is actually Plan B. All that other
stuff: the flats, the medical emergencies etc. is in reality Plan A, because it
obviously reflects the Yad Hashem which is manifesting itself in our lives.
It’s all a
matter of focus.
It’s all
about looking at life’s curve balls as the real Plan A rather the ruination of
what we
thought was Plan A.
All well and
good to be sure, but what about Plan D?
Plan D?
In
contradistinction to Plan A, which we should accept with a smile even though it
presents itself as somewhat of a stick that seemingly runs us around a track
that we don’t want to be on, there’s Plan D which comes disguised as a carrot for
which we all too readily put our plans (Plan B) on the back burner.
You had planned
to go to sleep at 11:00 P.M., but just when you were about shut down your
computer at 10:45 P. M. to say Shema it occurred to you check out a review of
the camera you were thinking about buying, or to maybe to read up on one of the
places you were considering moving to when you make Aliyah fifteen years from
now. Or perhaps you sat down to learn at
your regular time and you felt the urge to first look through the mail that was
just delivered.
Welcome to Plan D
(as in distraction) which is not a plan at all but rather a scam brought your way courtesy of your
Yetzer Hora.
And if you have
ever been internally induced to shift your focus from a purposeful activity in which
you were engaged to something else then you have tasted of it.
Irrespective of
how successful the Yetzer Hora is with someone in relation to the BIG things,
however they may be defined vis á vis any individual, when it comes to the
small stuff of life, Plan D invariably rolls up the score by nickel and diming
us with every sort of permissible distraction and just like one of Pavlov’s
dogs we more often than not react reflexively.
The very same activity
that would be squeaky clean if planned by you in advance morphs into a
stumbling block when performed at the behest of the Yetzer Hora while you were
otherwise productively engaged.
And I should
know what I am talking about because in the course of writing this I let
my guard down twice so far and went for the bait being dangled in front of
me.
Oops! Make that three times.
I just went into
the kitchen to get a cup of coffee and on the way back a little voice inside
said: Hey, you haven’t looked at you’re seforim in ages so why not now?
Without the
slightest hesitation or reflection I detoured toward the living room and began
to scan the various shelves. Had I not
been writing this piece at the time I would have wasted at least five minutes
on a senseless activity that I hadn’t even thought about, much less planned.
But given that I
was in the midst of trying to work through this problem (hopefully to everyone’s
benefit) I was able to catch myself in about fifteen seconds.
The Yetzer Hora
never ever plays a losing hand because it eschews frontal attacks (except against
weaklings) in favor of operating laterally.
And while it is
true that some of us are able to resist its inducements in a given situation,
the majority gets taken to the cleaners time and time again because Plan D is a
sleight of hand so smooth that we don’t even notice because it spontaneously takes
us to places where we want to go. And
because we want to go there and (in a general sense) it is permissible to be
there we’re not even cognizant that we are AWOL (absent without leave) from where we
should really be.
