Delphic Maxim 18: Honour providence

I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.

18. Honour providence

This maxim is a tricky one, because it leans again on the idea of a higher power, or at least a sense of fate or destiny. For someone like me who tends to be more agnostic than anything else, this is a challenge. The things that happen to us are branching paths of contingency, chance and happenstance play out in our lives, rather than some divinely inspired plan.

And yet, the things that do happen to us feel meaningful, and we tell ourselves the story of our lives retrospectively. So it can look and feel like we have a destiny, and we can create a plan and structure for our lives that might be as good as anything that comes from divine providence (even if Fortuna delivers us a few rude shocks along the way).

So how do you ‘honour providence’ when you aren’t sure that providence has any substance — how do you accept and honour a destiny that you believe is written with every passing moment in the ink of fluctuating probability?

Epictetus gives us as neat little insight in Enchiridion:

“Don’t hope that events will turn out the way you want, welcome events in whichever way they happen: this is the path to peace.”

Now this is a typically Stoic message, and those of you who have followed along these maxims from the start will be aware that I often find the Stoic worldview a little lacking. However, I do like this dimension of Stoicism: the idea that we should be ready to deal with the things that happen to us — that are out of our control — without losing our minds too much.

Things will happen to us over which we have no control. Accidents happen, people get sick, nature wreaks havoc — there are circumstances that shape our lives which the ancients might have ascribed to divine providence. Yes these upset us, but railing against them as though they were ‘injustice’ doesn’t honour the idea that they are random events (or what Nassim Taleb would call a ‘black swan’ — a seemingly improbable, dramatic event with hugely scaleable negative or positive consequences).

Providence in this sense delivers both booms and busts, and we are inclined to focus on the negative and forget that there is often good fortune as well — and it manifests in a whole bunch of different ways. Even good fortune in its negative sense is a gift of this kind of probabilistic providence (how lucky we are to not catch a virus when we encounter it, or to not be in the place of a tragic accident we had been at moments before).

There are some things over which we do have control, and honouring providence in the sense that I am using it also involves recognising that. If there are social, environmental, physical and mental circumstances that are in our power to influence — and we don’t — then it isn’t right to ascribe negative (or positive) events to pure chance either. Recognising the way we shape our world is just as important in ‘honouring providence’ as recognising that some things are beyond our control.

So the core of the lesson is this: shit happens (that’s the ultimate colloquial expression of ‘honour providence’. If the Delphic Oracle were around today — perhaps as a Gen Xer smoking weed or DMT rather than inhaling the vapours of Apollo — I’m sure the Pythia would have ‘shit happens’ inscribed on the temple). Don’t let the shit you don’t have control over get to you too much, and make sure you own the shit you do have control over.