Ariana Greenblatt, a Virgo.
Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photo: Getty Images
Uranus and Neptune team up today to give you a deeper understanding of the world and to help you figure out where you fit into the big picture. Especially if you’ve been held back by tradition, unable to imagine alternatives to what’s expected of you, you’ll grow by leaps and bounds once you let yourself think outside the box. You might fear that you’ll embarrass yourself if you truly let your creativity run wild — but today, these two powerful planets urge you to let go of that fear.
Making important decisions can be incredibly stressful — the more options you have, the more you worry you’ll make the wrong choice. Although you think of yourself as a bold and decisive person, sometimes you secretly wish that someone else would step in to choose a path for you. But ultimately, you can’t outsource the work of decision-making to anyone else because you know yourself and your needs best. Today, try to stop worrying that you’ll make the wrong decision. There is no one perfect choice, but you can choose one that’s good enough.
You wish you could be the sort of person who is totally fearless, meeting each new challenge with courage and confidence. Compared to some of your friends, who seem able to live as they please without worrying about the consequences, you sometimes worry that you’re weak and cowardly. But the truth is that everybody is scared sometimes, even the people who try to pretend otherwise. Today, remember that you’ve got something much better than fearlessness: the ability to act in spite of your fears.
Sometimes it’s necessary to be strategic, to think three steps ahead and forgo immediate rewards for the sake of your long-term plan. Other times, though, the future is too opaque for you to make plans with any confidence, and the more you attempt to map out your life, the more stressed you become. Today, make things simple for yourself by taking each moment as it comes. If you act with courage and integrity along the way, your path may not be the most efficient one, but you’ll arrive somewhere gratifying in the end.
When everything is going according to plan, you’re unlikely to appreciate any surprises. They’re only likely to make things worse — or at least more complicated. But when life feels more chaotic and uncertain, when nothing seems to be going your way, it gets easier to embrace the unexpected. You can recognize that each little surprise offers a glimmer of possibility, a reminder that as frustrating as life seems right now, it won’t stay this way forever. You always have other options, and today it’s up to you to see them through.
Without realizing you’re doing it, you sometimes close your mind to new possibilities. It’s not that you’re trying to be inflexible, only that you trust your own judgment; you generally believe in your own logic. Today, though, try to be a bit more open to new ideas and especially to your friends’ points of view. Instead of automatically shutting down any point of disagreement, try to simply listen. Don’t be so credulous that you’ll believe just about anything, but don’t assume that you have nothing left to learn, either.
You aren’t someone who’s totally set in your ways. You’re more than willing to learn and adapt — but only if you can be the one in the driver’s seat. When it feels as though you’re just going along with others’ ideas — or, worse, letting them tell you what to do — you start to worry that you’re weak-willed or losing your sense of self. Today, though, don’t be so resistant to letting others change your life. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have firm boundaries; you influence others’ lives all the time, so let them do the same.
You do your best to make rational choices, weighing all your options and selecting whatever seems best. So it can be frustrating when the people you love move through life haphazardly, making decisions that seem misguided. But today, instead of assuming that they’re being foolish and irresponsible, try to stay open to the possibility that they have more knowledge of the situation than you do or that their goals are simply different from yours. Life isn’t one-size-fits-all, and generally speaking there aren’t objectively correct choices.
If you have a hard time sticking to your plans today, you’re likely to assume that it’s because you’re simply being lazy and undisciplined — in other words, that the problem is you. But right now, it’s just as likely that the problem lies in your routines: Maybe you’re asking too much of yourself, or maybe part of you recognizes that an element of your day-to-day life isn’t necessarily serving you. For now, give yourself permission to depart from the script; with a bit of trial and error, you may discover new routines that will work better for you.
Lately, part of you feels foolish for looking for the best in others. You want to have faith in people, but it seems as if whenever you give people the benefit of the doubt, you get burned; whenever you put your trust in new people, you eventually regret it. But today, don’t let yourself grow bitter or resentful. Some people might not deserve your trust, but that doesn’t mean you should close your heart to everyone. Right now, if you give people a chance to live up to your expectations, they probably will.
You understand that you can’t expect to have fun all the time. It’s sometimes necessary to buckle down and deal with inconvenient tasks or to sacrifice your own enjoyment for the sake of everyone else. Today, though, remember that you shouldn’t have to treat your own happiness as an afterthought. Just because your personal satisfaction isn’t the most important thing in the world, that doesn’t mean you have to constantly put it last.
The more you care about your big-picture goals, the more frustrating it is when distractions pull your focus away from them. Lately, it feels as though everyone’s constantly clamoring for your attention, asking you to take on random tasks and additional responsibilities that have nothing to do with the things you truly care about. Today, remind yourself that you can say “no” to other people’s requests — but at the same time, don’t be so quick to turn them down that you end up missing out on unexpected opportunities.
Today, the best choices may be the ones you make at the spur of the moment. If you take too much time to weigh your options, or put too much pressure on yourself to reach a perfect conclusion, you’re likely to overthink things. So for now, try to trust your intuition rather than attempt to game out every possibility. Impulsiveness won’t serve you well in all situations, but right now it can help you to cut through the noise and land on the right path.
Buy Claire Comstock-Gay’s book, Madame Clairevoyant’s Guide to the Stars, here.
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