Slow Havamal: 74

[kylec]

The 74th verse opens with a seaman at evening anticipating his dinner, a short sail from home. It’s pointed out that autumn nights are unreliable. Things can get worse in an evening, and more so in five days, or a month.

When we go through difficulty, we long for relief to the point that we assume it, having crossed a certain milestone. When the sailor sights the shore, or enters the fjord, he may be tempted to smile and let his guard down. He’s come a long ways, and to be sure, the worst of the likely dangers are behind him. It’s in these final miles that he must be most careful. The danger comes not from some great risk inherent in this part of the sea, or from breaking a taboo of overconfidence. It lies in the sailor’s attitude.

That overconfidence—excusable, given the work he’s endured and the reward to come—changes the way he reads the water, or the extra effort he’s willing to undertake when everything seems fine. Maybe he hurries along, carrying too much sail, or skips a detail that only matters to box-checkers. His dreams of a fire and a meal may interfere with his normally keen attention, and unwanted signs of trouble can be brushed off.

When things happen a certain way for us the majority of the time, we tend to think they’ll continue after that fashion. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has made a living writing about black swans—rare, unpredictable events that have consequences which billow skyward. They can be for good or ill. When a course leads to small, predictable rewards most of the time with the rare chance of fatal error, it’s called “fragile.” One failure is enough to ruin us, and the improbability of it will be little consolation.

Most of the time, things will happen as expected. In those cases, it’s useful to ask ourselves if the unexpected leads to wild success or cataclysm. Sometimes, fragile propositions are unavoidable, as for seamen. For the rest of us, it isn’t always obvious what hidden dangers lurk. This verse has much to say about expectations.

An expectation is a prediction of the future—a difficult skill, even for the best diviners among us. When we’re closer to home, our predictions are more likely to pan out, though we all know a story of someone who got into a car crash around the block, or lost everything at the buzzer. But we don’t just try to predict the next five minutes, as fraught as they may be. Often, we take decisive action based on predictions of future events days, months, or years ahead of time.

We have to act now in some way, of course. But according to Odin (and supported via math by Taleb), it’s best to separate our hopes from our expectations. It’s a wonderful thing to hope for the best. Nor do I think we should prepare for the best while “expecting the worst.” That’s a miserably pessimistic life, even if nothing goes wrong. Instead, we need to be honest about our ability to predict the future. How often do you, personally, make accurate predictions days, months, or years in advance? Sometimes you do! How often are you wrong? And more importantly than both of those questions: what are the consequences, for luck or tragedy? We can stand many small failures. It’s the black swans we need to watch out for. Be honest when there’s potential for one. Expect not a single future, chosen via probability or wishful thinking, but a wide range of possibilities—including those you never expected! That means the good ones, too.

My actions, then, would best be geared towards options rather than expectations. When I sail home, I need to admit that what I want may not come to pass, and keep the ship in a nimble state, so that when the unexpected inevitably happens, I have the most diverse courses of action available to me. This may mean more work upfront that never pans out. All you have to do is survive once to justify a lifetime of care.