Emily articulated: Written in the stars

By Emily Erickson
Reader Columnist

I had a notably bad day last week. Not the kind of bad day when anything catastrophic or earth-shattering happened, but a day where one little thing after another went wrong. It started with spilled coffee on my white bedspread and a $60 cleaning fee request from an Airbnb host (the pet fee I’d already paid didn’t extend to “lint rolling the couch” my dog had curled up on). 

While still fuming at that request — they should have specified the room as *hairless pet* friendly — I was jolted out of my reverie by red-and-blue flashing lights in my rearview mirror. A police officer strode up to my car window and asked, “How’s your day so far?” as the silence of the 6 a.m. streets made a mockery of my building rage. I barely bit back, “How do you think it’s going?” as he informed me I hadn’t stopped long enough at the empty intersection’s stop sign.

Emily Erickson. Courtesy photo.

The $90 citation was followed by a three-hour dentist appointment (of course they found a cavity), paying my taxes and the check engine light in my car blinking on, prompting me to pull into a parking stall before an afternoon walk with a friend. The stall, I’d later find, was in a newly restricted and poorly-marked “No Parking” zone — a fact I would learn from the bright green warning sticker affixed (near-permanently) to my window.

As I walked with my friend, venting about the string of events that had squeezed themselves into the 12 hours I’d been awake, I felt like if a sit-com writer’s room was scripting my day, a bird was about to poop on my head. 

“I think I’m cursed,” I laughed, mostly without humor.

“Well, Mercury is in retrograde,” she explained. “And with this upcoming eclipse, it’s not surprising it’s hitting you extra hard.” 

I blinked, surprised by the simple conviction in her answer.

Bolstered by the idea of blaming something larger than myself for my really bad day, I looked up “Mercury in retrograde” when I got home. I learned that astrophysically, it’s an optical illusion of sorts, where Mercury — at least from Earth’s vantage point — appears to change direction and move backward across the sky before returning to its original, forward-charging path. Astrologically speaking, this phenomenon is believed to wreak havoc on technology and communication and increase negative emotions such as anger, anxiety, resentment and sadness.

I’ve never given much weight to astrology, not willing to relinquish any of the control I feel like I have over my life, my moods and my choices. But I have always given a lot of weight to meaning-making. 

Since people have been people, we have used different methods of explaining the things we’re experiencing and for understanding our unique way of being in the world. From strength-finder and enneagram tests to psychological and behavioral groupings, and online quizzes determining which “Cheese We Are,” we love organizing ourselves into categories — using those categories to examine ourselves and our relationships with others.

With meaning-making in mind, I sat with the definition of retrograde, eventually finding truth to the optical illusion-nature of the event, and the metaphor inherent in a solar eclipse. I considered that sometimes, seemingly out of nowhere, events that are usually significantly smaller than the rest of our lives (even 400 times smaller, like the ratio of the moon to the sun), are suddenly more impactful, made bigger by their closeness and the timing with which they present themselves. 

Other times, it feels like we are knocked into reverse, suddenly streaking backward on our well-orbited path, for what feels like no reason at all. 

But in each of those instances, is the power of perspective. The moon, in a trick of proximity and place, only feels larger than the sun, temporarily positioned to block out its light. And Mercury only looks like it’s moving backward.

In the same vein, if I wasn’t raging about my Airbnb fee, maybe I would have stopped a full three seconds at the stop sign. Without a citation, perhaps I’d have had the head space to notice the “No Parking” sign tucked near the hotel parking lot’s entrance. Between those events, I may have had the presence of mind to take the little things in stride, giving them only the weight they deserve before considering myself irrevocably cursed. 

Sure, my bad day could have been influenced by Mercury, emboldened by the solar eclipse (I’m certainly not discounting it), but it was also undeniably affected by my perspective. My perception of the day colored each precipitating event, allowing each to grow so big that, together, they blocked out all that was also going right. 

But like the eclipse, it only takes a brief stint in darkness to jolt me back into right-sizing the good around me, reinvigorated by how lucky I am and how nice it feels to bask in the light of the sun.

Emily Erickson is a writer and business owner with an affinity for black coffee and playing in the mountains. Connect with her online at www.bigbluehat.studio.