“Whenever you find yourself blaming providence, turn it around in your mind and you will see that what has happened is in keeping with reason.”
EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 3.17.1
Ryan Holiday does a great job of explaining this quote, in today’s entry in his book. He highlights that although things might not always seem to unfold in a way that pleases us or helps us with our master plan, there might actually be a bigger plan that is unfolding which isn’t apparent to us.
Now if you’re like me, then you don’t consider yourself particularly religious — and phrases like “a bigger plan” sure sound an awful lot like a sly way of saying “God’s plan”. My alarm bells go off when I hear that type of language. But bear with me for a minute, as there might be some wisdom from an unlikely source here which could be of value to you, even if you don’t believe in God.
The common phrase which you may be remembering is that “God’s plan is not always clear to us”, and that we should just “trust His plan”. Take a deep breath, set aside the Christianity for a minute and re-position this in terms of fate — and accepting that things will unfold as they are meant to unfold. (Perhaps even learn to align your will with fate, if you can.)
Holiday points out that oftentimes, (bad) events which seem to have no rhyme or reason are just the opening act to something much bigger and more beautiful than we could imagine. What the universe has in store for us is not always obvious from our limited vantage point. Sometimes we can’t see the good thing coming down the pike, because our sights are laser-focused on the bad thing that’s coming first.
Try to accept that there is a bigger plan which all events come from, and that this plan is sometimes obscured from our view. What might seem like a setback is perhaps just a step forward in the ultimate direction of happy days to come.
