Risk is Part of Life

Give it the Old College Try

Amy E. Barr, The Lukeion Project

According to Grammarist, “give it the old college try,” an idiom that means “to put forth one’s very best effort to achieve something with a high risk of failure,” came not from colleges but from baseball. The old saying was framed around the notorious enthusiasm of an amateur athlete playing for his college team. The passion of a young energetic person attempting to impress his coach and peers might compel a player to catch an impossible fly ball or to risk his good looks by sliding face forward for a home-run.  

Which risks seem worth “the old college try” to you? Maybe you are so risk-adverse that you plan to stay in your basement to safely hide from life’s troubles. Perhaps you enjoy taking risks. You might consider parkour, exotic pets, adventurous foods, and walking a slack-line across vast chasms as worthwhile activities. Good for you! Take pictures for the rest of us.

Risk is unavoidable. Much of it can be the spice of life. Some of it is not so spicy. Most of us are middle-of-the-road when it comes to both risk-taking and our level of enthusiasm for those risks. The average human maintains comfort zones carefully but will occasionally venture outside of favored boundaries to attempt something new, difficult, or even risky (especially to impress).

If you’ve ever been accused of over-thinking, this means you spend quality brain energy vacillating and oscillating between the virtues of remaining in your comfort zone vs taking on challenges. Over-thinking things is what humans have done for centuries. Who or what decides the outcome of ventures tempted?

In Virgil’s Aeneid, Trojan refugees are led by rex Aeneas. They are driven by fate to undertake harrowing trials. The first half of the Aeneid follows Aeneas as he tries to get home to his new territory in Italy. Virgil made his chief character as a Roman parallel to Greek Homer’s Odysseus. Unlike swashbuckling Odysseus, Aeneas piloted past monsters, shipwrecks, and even the underworld to fulfill his patriotic duty to secure the safety of his fellow Trojans and then found the Roman race. Virgil weaves the Fata, the Fates, into his heroic account because despite risks and massive effort, Aeneas and his people will not fail. Aeneas’ success was set in stone by The Fates and by a poet retelling the tale 1000 years later.

Cicero said in his partly surviving work On Fate, “What I want to know therefore is … if there were no such word at all as fate, no such thing, no such force, and if either most things or all things took place by mere casual accident, would the course of events be different from what it is now? What is the point then of harping on fate, when everything can be explained by reference to nature and fortune without bringing fate in?”

Estimating probabilities of success and failure did not really get going until 1494 when Luca Pacioli, a monk in the Franciscan order, posed a puzzle that laid the foundations for modern risk calculation when inn 1654 the Pacioli Puzzle was finally solved. Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat had to get involved. Around this same time an Italian doctor, Girolamo Cardano, estimated the likelihood of different outcomes of rolling dice. Galileo would come to the same conclusions that Cardano did but didn’t make a fuss because he had his hands full with galaxies at the time.

For most human historical record, people viewed risk as something dictated either by fate or divine providence. Even Aeneas feared the fierce interference of an angry goddess intent on drowning what little remained of the Trojan nation, despite the dictates of The Fates (of whom there were three). The will of the Roman gods were not quite as powerful as destiny but often the lines were blurred for we poor mortals.  

What would you risk doing if you knew you could not fail? What if you believed that success—at whatever challenge is ahead—is something that fate has preordained? You would also have to acquiesce to the reverse: failure—at whatever challenge is ahead—is equally dictated by fate. This was the primary outlook of most ancient civilizations. Cicero (On Fate) detailed the problems we would face if we truly believed everything that happens is purely thanks to fate. He forecasts for such a person “the entire abolition of action from life.”

While Cicero continues to grapple with ideas of fate, providence, causation, and free-will, his worst forecast is for those who truly believe that fate is set: “If it is fated for you to recover from this illness, you will recover whether you call in a doctor or do not; similarly, if it is fated for you not to recover from this illness, you will not recover whether you call in a doctor or do not; and either your recovery or your non-recovery is fated; therefore there is no point in calling in a doctor.”

Aside from insurance companies and investment firms who now know how apply their best mathematical calculations to spread-sheets and apps to determine risks and possibilities in the form of fractions of standard deviations, most people still do their own personal calculations about how often they are ready to go all-in on something that seems risky, dangerous, or just labor intensive.

We modern souls are no further along than Cicero as he tries to calculate the role of fate, free-will, divine interference, or (as he says) “the unexplained swerve of atoms” as we navigate life, choose when and where to work, when to rest, and in figuring out what is “meant” to happen to us. Freewill resides in our own not knowing, either way. We wouldn’t want to see our fate nor that of our loved ones. We simply couldn’t bear the knowledge of our own destiny. So, the only logical alternative is to press on with all things as though we cannot and must not fail.

Cicero. De Fato. Trans. R. Rackham

Felix, Qui Potuit Rerum Cognoscere Causas

Lucky Is He Who Can Understand the Causes Of Things

By Amy Barr at The Lukeion Project

In a brighter and better world, October would mean most of us would now be finishing the chores of harvesting. Moods would brighten as temperatures drop. Communities come together to enjoy the celebration of a good harvest and the promise of a well-earned winter rest with well-stocked larders.

The virtues of various agrarian cycles seem a bit dreamy (at least if you are wired like I am) but I get to experience this ancient autumn ritual, albeit vicariously. I live close to Amish communities and have several Amish friends whose skilled planting, harvesting, and preserving make my attempts utterly incompetent. In early October, most fields have been put to bed for the winter except for a few beds of cabbage and collards. Everyone pulls together for last harvest chores which, about now, includes boiling down this season’s sorghum syrup while the final hay cuttings are tucked into barns. If families are too busy to cook during this final autumn rush, there are shelves and shelves of home preserves that make for fast feasts.

There’s a brilliant tango of tasks, chores, habits, rituals, and celebrations connected with an agrarian life. The deep satisfaction over successfully navigating the caprice of weather, animal health, and a zillion other challenges of growing things for oneself. Having a deep understanding of the causes of things—from what it takes to grow great tomatoes, to knowing when is best to harvest, to figuring out when is best to plant again—that is the very substance of a deeply satisfying life.  

One of the earliest pieces of Greek poetry was composed by Hesiod around the same time that Homer was composing his Iliad and Odyssey (roughly 750 B.C.). His Works and Days extols the virtues of the human relationship with the land and the importance of hard work. Philologists describe his poetry as didactic (educational). If you’ve never read this poem for yourself, it may be because few today are attracted to poems teaching you how to farm!

Hesiod and other poets inspired the Roman writer Vergilius (aka Virgil) who composed a 4-part (4 seasons) poem called Georgics, named from the Greek word γεωργικά, "agricultural things." Vergil expounds on the beauty of an agrarian life and then, as they say, he gets real. After extolling the virtue of hard work and the satisfaction of success in book 1, he describes a massive storm that brings all of man's efforts to nothing. I’m sure there are some citrus farmers in Florida that can relate right now.

In book 2 Vergil focuses on seemingly mundane things like grafting, growing vines, and the beauty of spring, all while describing agriculture as man's struggle against a hostile natural world (much like goats eating what he’s so carefully planted). He soothes his readers with assurances that despite the challenges, there’s certainly more to offer in the country vs. corrupt and filthy cities.

After book 3, when Vergil addresses the issues of taking care of animals, the poet compares the habits of bees to the lives of humans in book 4. Bees suggest many applicable virtues but “lack love and the arts.” The poet impactfully compares the fragility of a colony of bees to human civilization which may buzz along with much success until suddenly it does not.

There are many other poets drawn to this subject including Nicander, Aratus, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Callimachus, Lucretius, Ennius, and others now lost to us. Vergil patterns his efforts on the neoteric poets who adored intimate personal themes expressed in a learned (well-informed) style. Think in terms of a textbook on agriculture written as a lofty poetic philosophical piece.

Vergil ties his poetic passion for all things agricultural to politics. In case you aren’t up to date on all the happenings of Rome in 29 B.C., suffice it to say that Roman politics make ours seem fairly tame. Rome had been rocked by civil war for a good part of a century and had only recently found small respite after the battle of Actium in which Octavian established the premise and groundwork to throw out the Roman Republic to better manage the “emergency” of a war that Rome picked with Egypt. Vergil even refers to a recent plague in book 3.

Though mixing didactic agrarian poetry, philosophy, politics, and bees seems like a strange mix, you’d be surprised. Vergil is in touch with the perils of losing everything to sudden storms or shifts in world events or the loss of loved ones due to illness. Though he’s known as one of Rome’s best poets in his war-focused work Aeneid, his first and best delight was in his little plot of land and a villa in the country.  "How lucky, if they know their happiness, are farmers, more than lucky, they for whom, far from the clash of arms, the earth herself, most fair in dealing, freely lavishes an easy livelihood."