Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy 5.4

“In the land where the Parthian, as he turns in flight,

shoots his arrows into the pursuer's breast,

from the rocks of the crag of Achmaenia,

the Tigris and Euphrates flow from out one source,

but quickly with divided streams are separate.

If they should come together

and again be joined in a single course,

all that the two streams bear along

would flow in one together.

Boats would meet boats,

and trees meet trees torn up by the currents,

and the mingled waters

would together entwine their streams by chance;

but their sloping beds restrain these chances vague,

and the downward order of the falling torrent guides their courses.

Thus does chance,

which seems to rush onward without rein,

bear the bit, and take its way by rule.”

—from Book 5, Poem 1

Mesopotamia was one anchor of the Fertile Crescent, and like Egypt, the other anchor, people have fought about it incessantly. As I jot down my scribblings right now, almost two thousand years after Boethius wrote, we still find ourselves fighting for it, and dying for it.

Those two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, start out in the mountains to the north, and they wind their own paths to the sea in the south. Rivers are mighty things, yet they are bound by their banks, and the laws of Nature limit their power.

I have never seen either the Tigris or the Euphrates in person, but I have seen the Danube, and the Rhine, and the Mississippi, and the Missouri, and I learned fairly quickly that these are forces you don’t mess with. Rivers can give life, and they can all too easily take life away.

Still, they are made to follow a course. They can be turbulent and destructive, but they are kept in their place. Even when they flood, they must ultimately return right back to where they started.

Fortune, or chance, or luck, or probability, or whatever else we might like to call it, is much the same as one of those rivers. It is still at one moment, and it rushes violently at the next. It comes and it goes. On this day it provides sustenance, and on another day it brings death. You will rely upon it, and yet you can never be quite sure about it.

Does it seem chaotic to me, so terribly unpredictable? That is only because I do not understand how all the pieces fit together.

I do not know that there was more snow up in the mountains a few months ago, and so I do not suspect that my humble home will soon be swept away.

I do not know that there was no rain a thousand miles away, and so I do not suspect that my meager crops will soon die.

Luck, good or bad, is only in how I perceive it, in my own limited way.

None of it is ever random, just like the flow of a great river is never random. I may fish from it today, and I may drown in it tomorrow. I may bless it or curse it, but it is not random.

The river will run in ways I won’t immediately predict, even as I could make some sense of it, if only I bothered to look with some care.

Written in 1/2016