Mercury Retrograde

About every four months, Mercury, the planet of communication, commerce and transport, appears to stop in its tracks and back up for three weeks, what astrologers call “Mercury Retrograde.”

When Mercury is in its retrograde period, communication snafus are common. Traffic snarls unexpectedly. Emails get lost, letters are returned to sender, computers crash, and messages disappear into the void. It’s a very bad time to buy electronics or sign contracts of any kind. One of my friends had his cellphone fall into a men’s room toilet. Most famously, Mercury stationed to go retrograde the very hour the polls closed in Florida in the 2000 election. By most accounts, it’s a three week headache.

But Mercury Retrograde isn’t really so bad if you know how to work with it. First off, you have to understand that in our technomaniacal society Mercury Retrograde is going to stand out as a much bigger deal than if we lived in an agrarian culture where high-tech means a new harness for the oxen. What seems to us to be such a malevolent force would seem more or less benign if we weren’t so intent on working against it.

Consider the flow of information coming at you on a daily basis, from television, radio, computer, and of course your cell phone (walky-talky and picture features available) and beeper. You can keep it all organized in your electronic organizer, which is probably internet connected, so if you can’t text-message on your cell phone, you can email from your Palm Pilot.

And it’s not just personal information. Remember when news stories had a beginning, middle, and end? Now, the flow of new stories just pushes even big stories to the back and out of the picture. Whatever happened with.....

It’s no wonder that people in their 30s and 40s are starting to think they’re getting Alzheimer’s and taking memory supplements. We take in an enormous amount of information, but rarely have the opportunity to digest it.

That’s the big Mercury Retrograde truth - you need a little background to see the foreground clearly. Without a little down time, our entire lives can seem like a gigantic “Where’s Waldo?” We’re swimming in a sea of information, really important personal, business and social stuff, bundled together with an extraordinary amount of useless chatter all making demands on our limited nervous systems. It’s not surprising that we can’t find our keys.

So during times when Mercury is retrograde, unplug, slow down, and go off-line. Don’t go after new information. Turn off the T.V.. Reread a book, but don’t buy a new one. Spend a little time outside, go for a walk. Or sit in the kitchen and talk. Or cook a really nice dinner. Play a board game or cards with friends. Do the sort of things that make time slow down, things that seem hopelessly boring on our 128 bit graphic world.

It’s even better if you can incorporate a little “background quiet” into your daily life on a regular basis. Then Mercury Retrograde won’t seem like such a change, and you’ll actually be able to function a little more clearly.

Of course, you can plunge ahead and try to ignore Mercury’s retrograde period. But don’t be surprised if you find yourself fishing around in a toilet for your cellphone.

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