Our Competence and Providence.

As we grow old we begin to feel that the  surrounding situations either facilitates us to move ahead or they act to militate against the  objective or goal of a person. 

We may also note that these situations themselves do not remain static as they themselves keep on moving in a pattern, generally not known to us.

It is our competence & providence that act together simultaneously to build a situation which,at a particular time, accelerates or retards the motion on the path of destiny.

          As long as one is alive one can't escape this net of destiny;the warp and weft of which is competence & providence.

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Our competence is determined by the knowledge we acquire,the skill we develop and the experience we gather. Our education,training and the formal/ informal

interaction with the people on/off the work serves as a source of such competence.

Though our competence does have a great impact on our providence, the relationship between the two is not that simple to be understood; much less explained.

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Then what is providence?

In my opinion providence is that part of our achievements or failure which more or less fails to be explained on the basis of our competence.

    Let us try to understand this by some examples from our daily life experiences.

Suppose two like minded friends go to purchase lottery tickets together and in the lucky draw one of them happens to be the winner.

     In a competitive examination; one candidate remaining out of the selection list and the other getting through it. It was so because the marks obtained by the first being just short of the cut-off marks and that of the second being just above it. 

This is example of providence which made one happy and the other sad.

       Imagine a person on the way. He, having walked too much, takes shelter under the shade of a tree in a bid to save himself from scorching heat in the summer. Suddenly the branch of the tree fell on his head and he succumbed to the injury. 

This is providence.

But this is also instructing to note that we do not stand to gain by complaining about our hard luck or providence upon which we have little control.

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The point to deal with competence and providence here is only to make ourselves aware that man is surrounded 24*7 by the situations which are either under his control or beyond it.

But the problem with us is that we habitually pine for changing those situations which are beyond our control while ignoring other ones which can be controlled to our favour.

The result of this mistake of dealing with the self is anxiety overload and loss of competence. 

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Therefore, in the face of adverse situations the minimum that we need to do is to identify those factors that we find controllable.

            There is no situation that defies, in toto, improvement caused by interference of resources, however meagre they may be after the attack of adversities of sorts. These residual resources may be in the form of knowledge,skill, experience, money etc. left with us as residue. 

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Thereafter we need to work on those factors identified as controllable ones and leave the uncontrollable ones to providence.

 Our knowledge, skill and experience as factors under our control can be of much help to mitigate the troubles played by providence. 

      It may not be surprising to find subsequently the uncontrollable variables gradually being reduced to controllable ones in quite a number of cases.

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R.R.Prabhakar.

03.10.2022.