Amidst clouds, a wheel turns. This is the Wheel of Fortune, and it's all about luck and change, misfortune and windfalls. Everyone rises and falls on the turn of this wheel. Sometimes you're lucky, sometimes everything that can go wrong does go wrong. The rich become poor, and the poor become rich. This may be the turning point, and it will manifest itself in the form of surprises, unexpected encounters, and twists of fate. Is the turn of the wheel completely randomized, or is it a matter 'of what goes around, comes around?' Or even; 'what goes up has got to fall?'

 

The Grateful Dead song 'The Wheel' puts it this way:

 

The wheel is turning and you can't slow down
You can't let go and you can't hold on
You can't go back and you can't stand still
If the thunder don't get you then the lightning will

 

In the Old Testament, it is the Book of Job which asks why bad things happen to good people. God has bestowed many favours upon Job, but then a catastrophic series of disasters befalls him. His livestock is stolen and killed, all his children die in a hurricane, and painful sores spread over his body. Many believe God would only have done this to Job if he had sinned terribly, but Job is sure he has not. But why, then, has God forsaken him? At last, God answers Job, and tells him that humans are so limited, so ignorant, that they can never know what they 'deserve'. They cannot own, control, or even understand their destiny. As philisopher Alain de Botton writes:

 

[The Book of Job] suggests that it is not for us to know why events occur in the way they do, that we should not always interpret pain as punishment and that we should recall that we live in a universe riddled with mysteries, of which the vagaries in our fortunes are certainly not the largest or even, as we will become aware if only we can look at matters from a sufficient remove, among the most important.

 

The imagery of the tarotcard The Wheel of Fortune originated in the medieval concept of the 'Rota Fortunae', the wheel of the goddess Fortuna. Representations from that time emphasize Fortuna's duality and instability.

 

I know how Fortune is ever most friendly and alluring to those whom she strives to deceive, until she overwhelms them with grief beyond bearing, by deserting them when least expected. … Are you trying to stay the force of her turning wheel? Ah! dull-witted mortal, if Fortune begin to stay still, she is no longer Fortune.

 

- Roman philosopher Boethius in his 'Consolation of Philosophy'

 

So the Wheel is always turning, introducing a strong element of change - change that doesn't seem to be initiated or wholly controlled by the person experiencing it. Paradoxically, that person is both entrained by outside forces ánd provided with new opportunities for shaping their own destiny. The trick is to use what chance offers. In his 16th-century political treatise 'The Prince', the Italian diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli writes:

 

It is not unknown to me how many men have had, and still have, the opinion that the affairs of the world are in such wise governed by fortune and by God that men with their wisdom cannot direct them and that no one can even help them; and because of this they would have us believe that it is not necessary to labour much in affairs, but to let chance govern them. This opinion has been more credited in our times because of the great changes in affairs which have been seen, and may still be seen, every day, beyond all human conjecture. Sometimes pondering over this, I am in some degree inclined to their opinion. Nevertheless, not to extinguish our free will, I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less.

 

I compare her to one of those raging rivers, which when in flood overflows the plains, sweeping away trees and buildings, bearing away the soil from place to place; everything flies before it, all yield to its violence, without being able in any way to withstand it; and yet, though its nature be such, it does not follow therefore that men, when the weather becomes fair, shall not make provision, both with defences and barriers, in such a manner that, rising again, the waters may pass away by canal, and their force be neither so unrestrained nor so dangerous. So it happens with fortune, who shows her power where valour has not prepared to resist her, and thither she turns her forces where she knows that barriers and defences have not been raised to constrain her.

 

In my favorite tarot deck, there is an hourglass on the Wheel of Fortune card, telling us that nothing lasts forever.