Actions Produce Consequences

Cooked breakfasts create a physical dissension for me. Bacon and Eggs, sausages, toast, hash browns, cooked tomatoes and baked beans, whilst involving a symphonic range of tastes, produce indigestion and heartburn for the rest of the morning. I am also inclined to overeat, compounding the problem. So, I find it hardly worth it to have twenty minutes of enjoyment only to ‘pay’ for it for the next four hours.

Take it a few steps further, many of us are prone to putting on weight. We eat a little too much and a little too much of the wrong things routinely, and over a span of ten years we put on ten to twenty kilograms or more.

Still another illustration: we enter into debate over some ‘important’ issue and find before long we’re debating not about the topic, but just to get the lead; offences are made and we find a falling out with a close friend or a family member ensues.

In the workplace, I live in the world of cause and effect. It’s not only the worldview for safety practitioners, but it’s what we must promote. People take safety risks and every now and then (certainly not always) there are negative consequences in the form of injury or illness or property damage etc.

These above really just prove to us that actions produce consequences. The law of cause and effect is a law of God’s and it cannot be amended or changed (see, for instance Psalm 119:96--God's law is boundless). It’s the way life works.

The great problem for all of us--and I put myself in this boat--is we rarely consider or heed the potential consequences. We’re such great risk takers, when if only we’d listen to our consciences or our experience more, (or take more time) we’d not get ourselves into messes to begin with.

To this end, can there be a better thing to engage in than a solid time of daily reflection over the roles and goals of the day ahead, or the day just gone, or the next day? Foreseeing problems, incidents and delays before they occur can in itself lead to preventive action well before corrective action becomes a necessity. It’s something important to ponder. It could save a lot of unnecessary pain one day.

Copyright © 2009, S. J. Wickham. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.