Win the battle, lose the war. If but for winning the battle, there is no war, hence no loss of war. Sounds like an oracle? No, it is reality – – political reality.
Mitt Romney recently won the Ohio primary by a relatively narrow margin. Perhaps he thinks luck is on his side. In fact it is. Based on my I Ching deductions, Romney’s Lucky Star has been rising and will peak around mid-summer. His campaign will culminate in his nomination by the Republican Party to be the presidential candidate. From August on however, his political fortune will begin to wane and he will struggle to regain momentum until Election Day in November, when his hope to become the president of the United States will be dashed. He will be feeling rather unlucky then.
Even though he has been lucky enough to have won crucial battles in the primaries, Romney will lose the war on contending for the presidency. He will surely be exhausted by the end of this long and arduous campaign. But in some peculiar way, he will actually feel relieved even after he loses the election. Without the initial good luck of winning his party’s nomination, he will not have the bad luck of losing the election.
Perhaps an old Chinese fable best sums up the subtle, often unforeseen relationship between good fortune and bad. Here goes the story.
A rancher lost his fine stallion one day and felt he was extremely unlucky. But in a matter of days, his horse returned, bringing with it an entire herd. Then he thought he was the luckiest man in the world. A few years later, bad luck befell his family when his only son became crippled in a riding accident. Soon after that, war was raging in the country and most young men in his community died in fierce battles. Fortunately, the rancher’s son survived because he was able to avoid conscription, due to his physical disabilities.
Good luck and bad luck often work in mysterious ways.