Your Lot in Life

Accepting your lot in life – that is a lot of what an astrology reading is all about, and that is a lot of what I am learning from studying traditional astrology.

I did a reading around a month ago, with a chart that was extremely severe – in technical terms, the sun was beseiged by Saturn and Mars, one by conjunction and one by opposition, within less than a degree. It was brutally hard.

I asked the woman if she had any questions, and she gave me a list, and one after another of her questions was picking up on all the really difficult things going on in her chart.

Why is my life so hard? Why am I never happy? Why do I always feel myself blocked? Why do my relationships all just fall apart? Could I be depressed?

I didn’t say this to her in quite these words, but my reaction looking at her chart was, No, you’re not nuts, lady, your life really is that hard. No, it is not your fault; this is your Lot in life, and it is not about to change. I may be able to help you find the best ways to deal with it, but I can’t change the basic tone of your life.

She wanted me to tell her what she had to do to make her life happy; I could only tell her what I read in her chart.

She was assuming that, if she only managed how to Do Things Right, that her life would be happy, and that somehow her problems were all her fault because she was doing something wrong.

No.

She wanted me to tell her what she Should do; I could only tell her what probably Would be happening to her. Not should, but would, with no value judgement attached.

I did try to read her chart in a way that she could maximize the things that were positive about it, but I could not make the difficult parts go away.

That runs so very much against the grain of so much of our modern culture’s attitude, that sense that you could somehow Have It All if you just managed to Do Things Right.

The dark underside to that is, when things do not go quite as well as you planned – which seems to be the case in almost all of the charts I’ve looked at – that it must somehow be Your Fault, you did something wrong and so you are suffering. You are failing to find the wonderful life that you should have had.

No.  No.  No.

In very many ways our lives our given to us, and are very largely out of our control.  Accepting that, and working with it, seems to me to be the one sane way to live your life. It seems pessimistic at a first superficial look, but considered more deeply, I think it clears away a lot of guilt, frustration, sorrow and unnecessary suffering.

Is there peace there, in accepting that we are part of a world that is largely out of our control, and that we can only acquiesce in its order?

If there is peace there, I haven’t found it yet.

I trust that there is a larger intelligent order to the Cosmos. Sometimes I sense how beautiful and even joyous it is, sometimes I only perceive its severity.