Delphic Maxim 43: Be accommodating in everything
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
43. Be accommodating in everything
One of the interesting echoes between Eastern and Western philosophical traditions is the regard paid to nature’s design. You could also use the word ‘plan’, because this is a little closer to the way these traditions express it, but ‘plan’ describes a kind of intentionality that natural processes don’t have. So for now, let’s call it ‘the way’. In The Tao of Pooh and the Te of Piglet, Benjamin Hoff describes wu wei, the practice of ‘going with the flow’, of not resisting the currents of ‘the way’ but instead riding along with it. His metaphor is the relaxed and calm way that Winnie the Pooh carries himself through life — unphased and unflappable as he goes about his adventures. Something similar gets traced in Stoic philosophy. Philosophers like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius stress the need to accept that nature has its plans, that to work with those rather than against them.
Being accommodating in everything means that we adapt ourselves to our circumstances, rather than fight something that might be inevitable — or where the fight would cost so much energy that it wouldn’t be worth it. Often much of the stress that we experience in life comes from exactly this kind of struggle — trying to make the world conform to our expectations when it would be easier for us to adapt to the situation itself: to go with the way, to ride the current down the river, rather than try to dam the river itself.
Now, this doesn’t mean just giving up and being passive and seeing what happens to us. Riding a raft down a river doesn’t mean you have no control — you sometimes need to paddle, you still need to steer around obstacles and navigate rapids. Going with the flow still requires effort and skill, and perhaps you need to swim, or maybe the boat will get rocky. But the point is that going with the natural flow of things is easier than fighting against a torrent. It’s a kind of pragmatism about life — rather than fighting to a standstill and burning all that energy, save that energy for the things you can more easily change.
At an interpersonal level, being accommodating smooths our interactions with people. Not everybody is content to follow ‘the way’, to relax into the direction of the stream. This means they are probably stressed out, and when someone who is more accommodating comes along and helps them into their boat, then their lives are suddenly made less stressful. So we are all fairly appreciative of accommodating people when they come into our lives! It feels good to be around people who are so at ease (as long as, of course, they are not so at ease that the river is carrying them out to sea)!
The lesson in today’s maxim sits nicely with a whole bunch of the maxims we’ve read through previously. It helps us to understand how a little bit of effort — life’s compound interest — can help set us up for bigger gains in the future. The way — in its most vast, cosmic manifestation — whatever you perceive that to be, can and will take you much further than tremendous struggle will alone. The Stoics recognised the need to work at yourself, to better yourself, to be a virtuous person with virtuous character. You have control over yourself — the raft with which you ride the rapids — and this is how you gain the ability to navigate the rivers and streams of life.
