Our acts and thoughts and all must be determined by circumstances... Do not live by certain fixed rules, except those that relate to the cardinal virtues... for you may have to drink the water to-morrow which you cast away to-day... The wise man knows that the very polestar of prudence lies in steering by the wind.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Prudence is largely the art of adjusting to circumstances rather than applying the same rigid formula to every situation. The wise person reads the conditions of the moment and steers accordingly, the way a sailor sets the sails to the actual wind rather than to the wind he wishes were blowing. This is not a licence for having no principles; the cardinal virtues, the deep ethical commitments, stay fixed, and it is only tactics, methods, and lesser preferences that should bend to circumstance. The warning against locking yourself into fixed positions is practical: conditions change, and you may need tomorrow exactly what you rigidly rejected today, so keep your options open. Hold your values firm and your methods flexible, and let the changing wind, not a fixed rulebook, set your course.
Practice
- Steer by the actual circumstances, not a rigid formula; the polestar of prudence is adjusting to the real wind, not the one you wish were blowing.
- Keep the cardinal virtues fixed and everything else flexible; values do not bend to circumstance, but methods and preferences should.
- Avoid locking into positions you may need to reverse; you can end up needing tomorrow the water you threw away today.
Use this when
- Use this in a changing situation where yesterday's plan no longer fits; read the new conditions and adjust rather than forcing the old rule.
- Use it to keep your options open; the rigid stance is fragile precisely because circumstances move.
Ignore this when
- Don't let flexibility reach the cardinal virtues; those are the fixed rules the counsel explicitly exempts, and bending them is not prudence but corruption (maxim 300 makes character the one non-negotiable).
- Don't confuse steering by the wind with having no direction; you still choose the destination, you just adjust the sails.
A picture of it
Committed to a fixed five-year plan, a founder keeps forcing the original strategy onto a market that has plainly changed beneath her, treating adjustment as a failure of resolve. The rigidity nearly sinks the company. Learning to steer by the wind, she starts reading the actual conditions and adjusting methods to them, while holding her core purpose and her ethics fixed as the cardinal points they are. The values stay put; the tactics bend. She even revives an option she had firmly discarded a year earlier, drinking the water she had cast away, because the changed circumstances now called for it. Flexibility on the how, firmness on the what, saves the venture.
Steer by the wind, not the rulebook, but keep the cardinal virtues fixed. Methods bend to circumstance; values never do.