Today is unseasonably warm, six days into spring.

By 11AM the temperature gauge reads in the high 70s. According to meteorologist’s report late in the day the temp will fall quickly with the onset of high winds and rain. Granted weather reports are much improved of late, but our examination of climate and weather do not disclose a simple/satisfying, comprehensible cause for our warming earth. I mean those upheavals in weather, the floods, super-sized hurricanes, and even the wild fires abetted by abnormally dry seasons.

Superior knowledge notwithstanding, to “be lucky” or be “unlucky”, — plays a role in life. How big you’d ask? That depends entirely upon your situation. Circumstances that you do not control.

Today my morning has been dedicated to considering luck. Knowing a general outline of change which is coming, doesn’t mean you can solve the problem of risk. Flood or fire, if due to circumstance you are somewhere, at an unpropitious time, — odds are high you’ll suffer injury or death.

There is no safe refuge for sentient creatures on this earth, or in the entire cosmos for that matter. Simply to be, bare existence entails the risk of untimely demise. After all, everything is in a state of change, a flow like a meandering creek, or like the torrent of the Columbia River. This means a hazard of drowning. And we are all swimming.

Here is a poem that I read, written by Aldous Huxley. The poem is a philosopher’s meditation, a wonderment that he/she is here at all, alive, able to consider the possibilities of the uncounted “others”, the never-born. Yet his/her lottery number came up, in the purposeless/intentionless/randomness of fate. The poem is meant to be a sarcastic counter to the comfort of Victorian Christianity, a notion of divine-father-overseer of the rise, the fall of empires, and the destiny of every living thing, etc., etc.. Huxley did not buy it. Nature is manifestly “cruel”. (Cruel in quotation marks because the term ought to be reserved only for human behavior).

The fifth philosopher whose voice the poem is, wonders that he has been allowed to survive rather than any of the uncounted millions who did not make it. Some would’ve been another Newton or another Donne. He a “grinder of philosophical sausage” rather than another genius… Evidence on the face of things that this universe has no divinely appointed program or rational design.

Enjoy the poem!

FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG

        By: Aldous Huxley

And among that billion minus one
  Might have chanced to be
Shakespeare, another Newton, a new
     Donne —
  But the One was Me.

Shame to have ousted your betters thus,
  Taking ark while the others remained
     outside!
Better for all of us, froward Homunculus,
  If you’d quietly died!

— From Leda (1920)