“The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.”

~P.F. Drucker, Writer and Management Consultant

Yipppeeeee! It’s my favorite time of the year, when Mercury goes retrograde and we all stick our foot in our mouth while graciously accepting responsibilities and entanglements that we would never otherwise be foolish enough to get ourselves into.

What is Mercury Retrograde you ask and why would something “out there” affect what happens in our lives “down here?”

Mercury, the fleet-footed God of the ancients, is the planet in our solar system that rules communication. He can get the point across quickly and smoothly with no confusion. Of course, that is when he is moving forward and he has his groove on. (So to speak.)

In a retrograde period, which happens occasionally throughout the year, we have a cycle of a few days or weeks when observing Mercury in the night sky would show you that it is apparently moving backwards in its orbit. This is an optical illusion caused by the difference in speed between the Earth’s rotation around the sun and that of Mercury.

While Mercury is appearing to us to be treading backwards on his path (something that all spiritual seekers can sympathize with) we down here on Earth, living under the influence of this motion, tend to experience some baffling and frustrating phenomena.

Yesterday my laptop computer which had miraculously lasted for five and a half years finally pooped out, not surprising at all since 5 is the number of completion. It had had the flickering screen, jam-packed memory, battery that wouldn’t hold a charge and overheating fan-thing going on for a couple of years. But I had learned how to combat and adapt to each of these inconveniences quite well. Yesterday it decided that there is never a power cable plugged in, even when there IS a power cable plugged in. I did discover that this was reparable by placing a very heavy dictionary on the connection part of the cable to torque it up a bit, but after just a few hours of that I realized I just needed to break down, clean out my savings and buy a new computer. So I type to you on it now….a desktop, I have decided to hate laptops for eternity.

So this is my Mercury Retrograde experience for this go-around. But others will experience these periods differently based on their sign and where Mercury is located in the sky when he turns back on himself. Some people will find their cordless phone suddenly needs a new battery, that their mortgage payment never showed up, that (like me at Staples yesterday) everyone you speak to seems to hear something entirely different than what you said or that you are hearing them as if they we speaking Swahili.

It is said that mercury retrograde is a bad time to take a new job, to sign a contract or to make a big purchase. It is also said that it is not a good time to travel. Is this all just poppycock or does it hold some truth? Well let’s put it this way, take a look back at any President to take the oath of office while Mercury was cooling his heals and you find two things: dead or dolt-headed. As for the travel thing, let’s ask some recent JetBlue passengers!

Still Mercury is generally our friend, worth invoking when speed and accuracy in everyday tasks and important communications is needed. I bought this computer yesterday even though Merc is Retro. You cannot always afford to wait to accommodate this cycle.

I wouldn’t get married in a Mercury retrograde but a computer is, I suppose, a changeable thing in the grand scheme of it all.

Happy haunting!

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