The Coin Toss of Existence

I have heard the phrase “Fortune favours the brave,” being incessantly drilled into my mind ever since I was a kid; hence, from a very young age, I naively believed that if I was daring enough, and took enough risks, everything else would fall into place naturally. Now, if you read the previous sentence and immediately went and confessed your true love to your high school sweetheart, that’s on you- because, though popular the quote may be, it is not entirely correct, apart from the obvious dramatic effect of its familiar words. The phrase itself is said to have originated from the Latin saying Fortes fortuna adiuvat, i.e. fortune helps the brave, if you translate it word for word. It comes from Terence’s play Phormio, circa 161BC. Yes, very antique. Although we now use the phrase in our day to day lives almost as a colloquial slang, the original use for it was almost exclusive to the dramatization of military affairs, and showcasing the heroism of would-be martrys. For example, Roman generals like Pliny the Elder used it in military contexts. Famously, Pliny said “Fortes fortuna iuvat” before sailing into the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD- a display of courage that proved more dramatic than wise, as he perished in the event- but the battlefield is not the only place where this divinity operates.

Coming to the crux of the matter, what even is “fortune”? Is it the same thing as fate? Is it destiny? Or can it be condensed down to something as crude and arbitrary as luck?

Fate is an often unchangeable, preordained course of events. It’s cosmic, impersonal and of course, inevitable. Destiny is similar to it, but instead of being a course of events, it is rather a purpose of end point an individual is bound to fulfil. It is, on the contrary, deeply personal and purposeful.

But what about luck?

In the Greco-Roman world, Fortuna (Latin) or Tyche (Greek) was a goddess- capricious, blindfolded, spinning her wheel. One day you rise, the next you fall. She symbolised unpredictability, chance, and something very involved in the human world, but completely indifferent to it. I don’t know about you, dear reader, but that sounds very much like an apt description of good, old-fashioned ‘luck’ to me. So, what do we do? Do we raise luck to the mythological and spiritual aspects of fortune, or do we dwindle the second down to the levels of the first?

I tend to do the latter.

Fortune -or rather, luck- is unfair. That is the truth of this mystical phenomenon in a nutshell. We do not control where we are born, what privileges we are inherently given from birth, whether we are born healthy or with deformities, whether our parents will even choose to raise us, whether we will even survive the car ride back home from the hospital and not get smashed into by an unassuming drunk truck driver- the list goes on and on. At the end of the day, we do not control anything. I know what this sounds like, trust me- Sneh, are you not peering dangerously over the edge of the cliff which descends into the absurdism described by Albert Camus?

And while that is a very valid question, no, I am not, since Camus’ reply to the bizarreness and abrupt nature of this universe was to accept it for what it is- something we cannot ever truly control, something which is far beyond the grasp of humankind. He embraced the chaos, and chose to make himself free from it by accepting it. I do not. Would you accept how your entire life turns out, from birth to death, all based upon a metaphorical coin toss?

I was born in an Indian household with access to all the basic necessities of modern life- a working washroom, a clean supply of water, electricity, you name it. It was almost like a birthright bestowed upon me. I did not ask for any of the aforementioned privileges, yet I got them. Beside my house, there live a colony of housemaids, their husbands and their children; and those kids have to work themselves for days -if not weeks- for the basic amenities which I do not even have to think twice about before using and disposing of. Did they ask for that life? Who decides why they do not deserve the privileges I was born with? It is all too infuriatingly unfair.

I ask myself, would I swap lives with any of those children, to give them those amenities, that lifestyle? But before I even finish framing the question, I know the definitive answer- no, I would not. And therein lies the eye of the storm- would making the life of one child make any considerable difference to the world in the grand scheme of things? What would the probability of them squandering it all and wasting their opportunity be? I even think to myself, selfishly, would I honestly enjoy living the life of one of them?

Although the margin of difference between the lower classes and people above the poverty line is huge, if we look at things from a more macroscopic perspective, we see differences and unfairness everywhere. Maybe a child, born with a talent for photography, asks his parents for a camera- but they cannot afford it right away, but one of his classmates with half his natural born talent asks for a DSLR and gets one delivered to him the very next day. It is, again, infuriating.

So, does fortune truly favour the brave? Or does it simply favour whoever it feels like, on a Tuesday afternoon, while spinning a wheel and sipping divine ambrosia with a blindfold on? Bravery might make you feel noble, and taking risks might get you applause, but neither is a guarantee of anything-not success, not happiness, not fairness. Sometimes, the brave get trampled, and the cowardly win the lottery. Sometimes the kind starve and the cruel thrive. That’s the inconvenient truth about fortune-it doesn’t play favourites. It plays dice. And we, the ever-hopeful, ever-confused mortals, just keep rolling.