I did have a lot in mind when I first went to Shar Yashuv and later to the Mir. [I had a great desire to learn Torah, and was not thinking about parnasa/making a living or getting married.] But the Mir in NY is a Musar yeshiva, and so I started getting the idea of what it is all about. That is: trust in God. So I more or less gained this mind set that all I need to do is to learn Torah and trust in God and then not worry about anything else. God will take care of things if you trust in Him.
You might see this in books of Musar like the Chovot Levavot, but I mainly got this idea from the later Musar book of Navardok.
So you can ask what do you do when things are falling apart? Well, one can fall from trust in God or trust more in God. I elected the idea that I needed to trust more.
But I admit that is not simple to do. Still I can see in the Torah there is this idea of "tests". Abraham was tested 10 times. So you can extrapolate from this that you or me might have other kinds of tests. And what we do in time of trial makes all the the difference of how things go later after that.
[You can see this in the events surrounding the kings of Israel. The major theme is always this: When king so and so trusted in God, things went well for him. When he turned to other gods, things stopped going well for him. That in a nut shell is the entire major theme of the entire Old Testament. So you can see the importance of trusting in God alone and not in your own ideas and efforts.]
[I ought to add here that my idea of learning Torah has expanded to include Physics and Metaphysics as the Rambam says openly in the Guide and in Mishna Torah and this is hinted at in the Chovot Levavot. I might have thought in this more expanded way just from theory itself and seeing the rishonim that hold this way. But experience brought home the idea to me. That is when my world was shaken up I had to rethink my basic principles. Few people rethink things when everything is going well. And that includes me. Only when I had to, that is when I stated to rethink things.]
[I might add here the LeM of Rav Nahman vol II. # 48 where he brings this idea that when one starts out in the service of God, it is the general rule that he is pushed away. Heaven is making obstacles. However this does not happen unless one is really intending to serve God. So if you see that you are having enormous obstacles in trying to learn Torah and serve God sincerely, that simply shows that you are doing it for the sake of God and that is good.]
