No doubt there are circumstances that exceed our ability to fully anticipate their consequences, but some of us deify Fortune at the expense of our own control. Juvenal noted this about 20 centuries ago when he said that if we have foresight, Fortune has no divinity: We choose to make the goddess Fortuna a deity and place her in the heavens.
Nullum numen habes si sit prudentia, nos te/ Nos facimus, Fortuna, deam caeloque locamus.
The “wheel of fortune” apparently spins at unknowable, variable rates, moving between “good” and “bad” luck. Anyone who has ever spun a roulette wheel knows the result: Random fortune, with the “good” coming from a “lucky spin,” and not, sorry to say, from insight, intuition, or foreknowledge. That wheel of fortune places us just a second and a space away from a car accident, preventing damage and injury, or it places us in front of a lottery ticket machine, pushing just the “right” button for the winning scratch-off. It also puts us in time and space with an accident or in front of a losing ticket.
Not all luck, however, is random. We know the stories of those who have “made their luck,” and usually those are tales of people who have taken risks in seizing circumstances where opportunities once dormant await their awakening. In 1899 a fellow named Edward John Phelps put this succinctly: “The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.”
We do have the ability to make both “good” and “bad” fortune, and in doing so we place ourselves in the heavens, not Fortuna.
Nullum numen habes si sit prudentia, nos te/ Nos facimus, Fortuna, deam caeloque locamus.
The “wheel of fortune” apparently spins at unknowable, variable rates, moving between “good” and “bad” luck. Anyone who has ever spun a roulette wheel knows the result: Random fortune, with the “good” coming from a “lucky spin,” and not, sorry to say, from insight, intuition, or foreknowledge. That wheel of fortune places us just a second and a space away from a car accident, preventing damage and injury, or it places us in front of a lottery ticket machine, pushing just the “right” button for the winning scratch-off. It also puts us in time and space with an accident or in front of a losing ticket.
Not all luck, however, is random. We know the stories of those who have “made their luck,” and usually those are tales of people who have taken risks in seizing circumstances where opportunities once dormant await their awakening. In 1899 a fellow named Edward John Phelps put this succinctly: “The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.”
We do have the ability to make both “good” and “bad” fortune, and in doing so we place ourselves in the heavens, not Fortuna.
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