Ecclesiastes 9:11 names five forms of excellence and declares none of them sovereign over fortune.

Plato's Laws ranks three forces governing life: God, chance and occasion, and skill, in that order.

The therapeutic task is not controlling circumstances but governing the mind that meets them.

Last week, a veteran told me something I have heard in various forms over the years: "I did everything I was supposed to do. And it still went sideways." He was not complaining. He was genuinely bewildered. The contract he had been operating under his entire adult life: Work hard, train hard, follow the rules, and the outcomes will track your effort. That contract had been broken, but not by him.

I have written previously about the convergence between Ecclesiastes and Plato. Here I want to dig deeper into the two passages that speak most directly to the man sitting across from me.

Ecclesiastes 9:11: "The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."

Five forms of human excellence. Not one of them rules over fortune. The Hebrew is worth pausing on. The word for "time" is et: not clock time but the appointed moment, the season that arrives unbidden. The word for "chance" is pega, from a root meaning to meet, to fall upon. Pega is what meets you on the road: the encounter you did not plan for and cannot prepare against.

These are not two separate forces. Et and pega are two faces of the same reality: fortune's timing and fortune's content. What falls upon you and when it falls. Time folds into chance. The seasons change, and you do not get to pick which one........

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