I originally wrote this piece when Mercury was in retrograde last year, but guess what? It’s in retrograde again! And the lessons seem just as timely as they did last fall.
Now some of you may think it’s all astrological hogwash, and that’s fine, but as a metaphor for challenges in creating and communication, I think it helps us understand how we get in our own way.
From a visual standpoint, Earth rotates around the sun much faster than Mars and Jupiter, and so even as all the planets are going the same direction around the sun, the outer planets seem to move backwards. Hence the name “retrograde,” and thus, a lot of people use the solar system as a scapegoat for all the things going wrong in their lives during these periods.
But the original Vedic meaning of “Mercury,” however, was called Buddha, which epitomizes the meaning of presence and the awakening of our discriminatory intellect. Our modern-day association with that word is miscommunication, but the Vedic sciences called Mercury a time for getting mindful-using our intellect, communicating clearly.
Oh, how time plus humans seems to mess things up.
I was walking down the street the other day in the chaos of Mercury’s retrograde…You know what that’s like: You accidentally send an email to your co-worker calling your boss a douche and somehow it goes to your boss instead. Your car breaks down for the third time this month. Your computer somehow deletes all of your saved emails. You find a text on your boyfriend’s phone…to his ex-girlfriend! With an emoji attached!
The obvious response: chaos, turmoil, upset, missed communication, iPhone being thrown down toilet. Or maybe these moments can help us to awaken instead.
So as I was saying, I was walking down the street, and as I passed this frazzled mom looking deeply into her teenage son’s eyes, I heard her scream to him, “Present. Moment!”
Snap! I thought it was genius in so many ways, if not mostly because it reminds us (and her freaked out son) that that’s all there is-the moment. What we choose to do with it is up to us. We can be here or we can be somewhere else in our heads, which isn’t here at all.
But also it was an unbelievable reminder from the universe to myself to get present-to stop being distracted by my thoughts. (What are the odds that I happened to be right there at that moment to hear what I most needed to hear?)
As soon as you realize you’re out of the moment you get present. That’s grace. You check out, and yet, your own tendency to check out can remind you to come back and be in the moment, to breathe, to stop fast-forwarding.
Get present. Be mindful. Play. Get out of your head. Give up worrying. It’s either going to work out or not. But worrying isn’t going to improve your situation. (Another way of saying it is, “Worrying is praying for what you don’t want.”)
So maybe next time Mercury is in retrograde-and all other times of the year-we can use it to our advantage to just be a little more here.