I am sure if you have been living for a while, you would have come across the phrase “when the wind is right,” and I am sure you understand what it means. When the moment is right, I will do it. But having read this phrase it has made me realise how stupid it is, because when you wait for the right winds, no wind will be favourable, because you simply don’t know your direction. As Seneca once said, “When a man knows not which port he sails, no wind is favourable.” Those who know where they are going do not need to wait for the perfect moment because obsession has inverted all friction to the wait, where they are almost pulled into their work.
I have also heard the other phrase so many times, how conditions make people; it’s a pivotal argument used in Nature vs Nurture, how you are a reflection of your external environment. You are therefore not the product of your actions but the product and a slave to the environment. And I understand the appeal of it. It is comforting to believe that you are the way you are because of something bigger than you, something with more weight than your own two hands. It takes the blame off your shoulders and hands it somewhere safer, somewhere that can’t argue back. Your parents, your postcode, your luck, your timing. All of it is easier to point at than a mirror.
But sit with it long enough, and the whole argument starts to crack.
The sailor without a compass
Think about the sailor again, the one waiting for the wind to be right. He stands on the deck every morning, checks the sky, checks the flag, checks the water, and every morning, he decides the wind is not quite right yet. Weeks pass this way. Weeks turn into months, maybe. He is not lazy, not exactly. He believes, genuinely, that he is being sensible. Why leave port on a wind that might carry you the wrong way? But not once does he ever consider: wrong way to where?
He has never once opened the map. He does not actually know if he is headed north or south, home or away, toward something or nothing at all. So of course, no wind looks right to him. Every wind looks like a risk when you don’t know what you’re risking it for. The problem was never the wind. The problem is that he has spent so long waiting for permission from the weather that he never sat down and decided where he was actually trying to go.
Now picture the other sailor, the one who has looked at the map, who knows the shape of the coastline he’s chasing, who has picked his direction even if he’s picked it imperfectly. For him, a headwind is not a reason to stay docked; it’s a problem to be solved. He talks. He adjusts the sail. He takes the long way round if he has to. The wind that would have kept the first sailor in port for another month is, to him, just Tuesday’s weather. Not because he’s braver. Because he knows where he’s going, and knowing where you’re going changes what the wind even means.
That is the part I think we get backwards when we talk about conditions making people. Conditions don’t ask you where you’re headed. They just blow. It is entirely up to you whether that wind becomes an excuse or a variable.
Nature, nurture, and the third thing nobody mentions
The Nature vs Nurture argument has been running for as long as people have needed somewhere to place the blame, or the credit, for who they turned out to be. Nature says you were built this way before you had a say in it. Nurture says the world shaped you before you had the strength to shape yourself. Both arguments are seductive because both let you off the hook in different directions. One says it was always going to happen. The other says it happened to you.
But there is a third thing which sits in the middle of that argument that gets ignored because it doesn’t flatter either side. It’s the fact that two people can be handed the same genes, the same home, the same disadvantages, the same wind, and walk away from it having built completely different lives. If conditions made the man in full, that would be impossible. There would be no explanation for the sibling who left, the friend who changed course, the stranger who came from less than you and somehow built more.
Something else is happening in that gap. Call it will, call it choice, call it whatever word survives being said out loud without sounding arrogant. But it is there, and it is the thing that decides whether a condition becomes a cage or a material.
I am not saying conditions don’t matter. That would be its own kind of stupidity, the sort of thing said by people who have never actually had to sail through a storm. Conditions are real. Some winds really are stronger than others, and it would be dishonest to pretend that a hurricane and a light breeze ask the same thing of you. But even in the worst of it, the wind is not writing the story on its own. It is only ever half the sentence. You are the other half, whether you show up to write it or not.
The slave and the sailor are the same person
The person who says he is a slave to his environment and the person who works around any wind are very often the same type of people, standing in the same conditions, on the same morning. The only difference between them is which sentence they chose to finish believing.
One says, look what the world did to me. The other says, look what I did with what the world gave me. Both sentences can be true about the same life, and it’s not too difficult to admit either. It’s not that the second person had it easier. Often he didn’t. It’s that he refused to let the first sentence be the whole story, even when it would have been the easier one to tell.
We like to imagine that people who overcame difficult conditions did so because they were somehow exempt from the difficulty, as though their storms were smaller than ours. They weren’t. They just stopped asking the wind to change and started asking themselves what they were willing to do inside it.
Waiting for the right wind is still a decision
The thing nobody tells you about waiting is that it feels like nothing, almost like a pause, like a neutral space where nothing is being decided while you wait for something better to arrive. But waiting is not neutral. Waiting is a decision dressed up as patience. Every day you spend in port, hoping the wind changes its mind, is a day you decided, whether you called it that or not, to stay exactly where you are.
This stings if you actually sit with it. You are not innocent while you wait. You are choosing the harbour, every single morning, by choosing not to leave it.
I think about how often I’ve done this myself, called it prudence when it was really fear wearing a more respectable coat. I’ve told myself I was simply waiting for better conditions, better timing, a clearer sign, when really I hadn’t done the harder work of deciding where I actually wanted to sail. It’s always easier to blame the wind you can’t control than to admit you never opened the map.
Knowing your direction is the whole trick
So maybe the real argument isn’t conditions versus will at all. Maybe it’s direction versus drift. A person without direction will always find a reason to call the wind wrong, because any wind feels wrong when you don’t know what you’re sailing toward. A person with direction can take almost anything the sky throws at him, because he’s not asking the wind to agree with him, he’s just asking it to move him, however roughly, toward something he already chose.
That’s what I think people really mean when they say conditions make people. They’ve mistaken a lack of direction for a lack of luck. They’ve spent so long waiting for the weather to hand them a life that they never got round to choosing one for themselves. And once you choose, even badly, even uncertainly, the wind stops being the enemy. It just becomes weather again. Something to work with, not something to wait out.
You don’t need the right wind. You need to know where you’re going. Everything after that is just sailing.
Leave a Reply