The Pangasinan Star ONLINE

WHAT would you give to see the future?

To many people, side by side with New Year’s resolutions (that are never observed anyway) their most ardent yearning is to be able to know what the future has in store forthem. And if horoscopes don’’t give them that foresight clearly enough, and satisfactorily enough, there’s the good, old fortune teller or palmist to consult for a good peer into what lies ahead for them and their loved ones in the new year.

This fetish for things magical or esoteric actually makes them more (or less) confident in facing the new year. It primes them up, as it were, for the more unpleasant surprises and reinvigorates them for the pleasant tidings that will come. It is a very typical human need: to be forewarned and therefore, be forearmed.

And yet, the downside in such a preoccupation for knowing the future thru cards, by crystal balls or via human medium is that where the prediction is dreadful, it can prove immobilizing. Terror has a way of keeping one’s actions tempered or grievously limited.

Thus, one who may have been forewarned about traveling on certain parts of the year would in all probability, skip trips that would have brought him great opportunities or profits. We know of some people who swear by a stack of tarot cards and a host of feng shui advice that they did avoid bad luck in the year by religiously following the “vibes”from these physical and mental “aids” like their lives and careers fully depended on them.

But in the same breath, we know of as many number of “unbelievers” who scoff at the superstitions and claim that the opposite happened – that by not hewing to the “signs” and “admonitions”, they precisely were able to avoid pitfalls and even expanded their avenues of good fortune. To each his own cure, to each his own poison.

For us, the simple abiding advice for everyone caring to read this piece is: Full faith in the Lord is all one needs to go thru this difficult life. His Divine Power can never be approximated, much less, assumed by the doomsayers who make a living predicting all sorts of tragedies and misfortunes at the start of a year, and basking in the resultant publicity generated by their earth-shaking statements.