Hump Day Science

Look, I’m into the spiritual dimensions and mysteries, for sure. In fact, I’m even strangely religious in some ways. And I have an extremely healthy respect for science. For data. I love data. Love it. It’s ridiculous.

Humans have been making observations of the sun, moon and stars and collecting data for millennia. Understanding the heavenly bodies probably proved helpful with understanding the best ways to survive – with farming, tides and even trade – and also how to best allocate the abundant resources with information gleaned from these celestial measurements. And as a result, we have the development of modern culture and cities and so on.   

It’s the directed and accurate focus of one’s observational skills and meticulous tracking that make these calculations possible. There’s also the fine details of the development of the mathematical languages necessary to express complex calculations. Which is totally amazing when you think about it, right? Further, these early scientists and astronomers also probably made observations (in addition to the math) the effect on humans of certain celestial phenomena.

I maintain optimism and gratitude for taking the higher view with this Mercurial example: Mercury, as a celestial body, has been measured and tracked since people began tracking these things and it was also observed to affect certain qualities in the more human dimensions of reality. Things like communication and focus. So much so that cross cultural mythologies developed around these characteristics. The Romans called this embodiment Mercury while the Greeks called it Hermes. We all know the myths – Mercury is the god of speed, communication, transportation and commerce. He’s sometimes considered a trickster god too, sometimes deployed to sow chaos… Hmmm.

One of the scientific observations of the planet Mercury is that due to its orbit, sometimes it appears to go backwards in the sky. And in these seemingly wonky, backwards calculations, a scientific observation was made that the associated qualities of communication, transportation and commerce also went a little wonky, and dare I say, trickster-like. These retrograde periods proved time and time again to have a real effect on all kinds of things. Like the moon does on the waters. Measurable. Calculable.

Well! This happened at the day job in *such* an absolutely fascinating and tangible way this week! And in a measurable form and in the shape of returned mail. Literally, the mail truck went out and turned around and drove all that shit back to our office. This decent (but not too over the top) volume of returned mail has been washing up on the mail room shore revealing a little tiny data flaw in a sub-segment of our data file. It is blessedly happening during a time period when we have the bandwidth to deal with it, (re)address it (ha, ha!) and purify this little data issue before we get busy again.

I have to trust that these celestial views I choose to embrace help me to appreciate the magical ripplings we make in the universe – like tapping a little data pool and watching the data wave rings roll out, and in this case reverb right back, revealing something to examine and to cleanup. Frustrating, to be sure, but one I like to chew on because my attitude matters in these things and impacts others I work with on the common mission of our organization. Few work there because it’s “just a job” and those that do self-select out pretty quickly.

For me it has been straight up helpful to look up when the retrogrades are (about three times per year) and go to ahead and make space on my calendar. Embrace them, harness them and help them work for me whenever possible. I mean, we all do that when the seasons change and coastal communities keep track of the tides and hey, this is exactly what the Farmer’s Almanac is for! (Side bar: a retrograde is potentially the perfect time for a public rewind and re-examination of the Mueller report, also happening this week.)

An understanding of Mercury in retrograde should come with every business, technology and psychology degree. A real study of these things and their (very real and very measurable) impact on morale, mistakes and even the bottom line would be fascinating. And on the flipside of these retrogrades I believe they actually leave us elevated and even more capable if we let them. Flushing out communication garbage is necessary on a periodic basis.   

Learn more about the planets, specifically Mercury this week on PBS.

And on the linguistic front, Wednesday is Miercoles in Spanish (and similar in other Latin languages), which is in turn Spanish for Mercury. Wednesday is Germanic for Woden who is… wait for it, the German god of speed, aka Mercury.  

​Patience, blessings and a calm mind to us all. 

​May it be so.