“If the breaking day sees someone proud,
SENECA, THYESTES, 613
The ending day sees them brought low.
No one should put too much trust in triumph,
No one should give up hope of trials improving.
Clotho mixes one with the other and stops
Fortune from resting, spinning every fate around.
No one has had so much divine favor
That they could guarantee themselves tomorrow.
God keeps our lives hurtling on,
Spinning in a whirlwind.”
Today’s quote in The Daily Stoic is from Seneca, and it comes in lyrical form as a sort of warning against expecting that your fortune will continue in the same way that it has thus far.
If you’ve had “triumph” in the recent past, you can’t expect that it will automatically continue. Everything changes in an instant, and one turn of good fortune doesn’t guarantee another.
Likewise, if you’ve had “trials”, then there’s every reason to hope that fate will instead bring you the opposite tomorrow, and that your luck will change for the better. Be ready, for even good fortune is an opportunity to prove yourself.
The one thing that you can be sure of is that fate is always twisting. The future events in your life are determined by forces outside of your control. They could go left; they could go right. There’s no way to know.
There’s no predicting which way fate is going to twist next, so it’s best to accept it and come along for the ride. If you align your will to what’s going to happen anyway, then you’ll never be disappointed in what it brings you!
