I Read My Horoscope Everyday – Here’s How My Life Changed

So who among us have made a beeline to the morning newspaper just so you could get your hands on, or to be more precise, set your sights on the day’s Horoscope? You know, the daily horoscope, an astrological chart that can predict your future on the basis of the planetary configuration.

I have developed this weird habit of reading my horoscope every day. My first encounter with this column in the newspaper was quite random. But, I am not the only one right? I’m sure you have all done it at some point in life. Every morning, we, the horoscope readers, pull up our horoscope hoping the stars have aligned in our favor and we’ll have a swell day ahead of us. It is not unlike a fortune teller, a charlatan with a pen scribbling out consonants and vowels that forms the words of our future, who’ll tell us what we exactly need to hear to make our heart soar with hope.

Taking cues from the horoscope is like having an invisible friend with magical powers who always has your back. They’ll send out a warning signal if there’s potential danger hovering on the horizon. Let’s face it, as pragmatic as we contrive to be in our lives, there are times when we succumb to the charm of a charlatan whispering sweet nothings and we go putty in their hands. I’ve fallen prey to the nifty spell of the horoscope and let me tell you how that changed my life. (spoiler alert, it didn’t)

I remember the day I had my horoscope read to me by one of my good friends. Allow me to paint a picture here. It was a starry night, we were packing our suitcase as we had a flight to catch the next night to Bangkok. We don’t precisely remember how she came upon that day’s horoscope since we’d never perused through it before. But, as fate would have it, she did. And, my horoscope on that fateful day read that I’m going to hear from a person who has pined for my affections for a long time. For someone who has been single for the longest time, any such heads-up can really make one jumpy. And oh boy, was I!

Considering how we were supposed to be boarding our flight at that particular minute instead of playing mirror on the wall, we would have preferred the horoscope had read: “Get on the plane you dimwits, you’ve got your days mixed up and you are going to miss your flight!” Irony anyone?

So, we missed the flight because we thought it was on the next day but we only realized that when we showed up at the airport. However, did I at least hear from the person pining for me? I did hear from somebody but not the person I was hoping to hear from. Suffice it to say the disappointment was acute. But, just for those few seconds when she was reading it out, I was filled with hope and just like that, I was caught in its gnarly web. I thought hey, so it’s not the person I had hoped it to be, but there was a person. I told myself that, “It’s all semantics anyway. It didn’t get it completely wrong. There were certain accurate variables there. So I can’t write this person off completely. I have to factor those variables in”.

(In retrospect, I should have written it off. If I had, it certainly would have saved me from writing a book that I’m going to moniker – Ibn Battuta Main Mera Dil Tootha. Yeah, that person did break my heart.)

So from that day forward, I became a citizen of Horoscope land. Gradually, I started reading it to look for instructions for the day. I guess that’s why most of us eat up every little word on that page, it gives you hope. Hope for a better future. Hope for something that will quite possibly never come. I had to learn that the hard way by getting my heart broken.

So, let’s just say it didn’t pan out the way the almighty horoscope said it would. The thing about prophecies is it’s not all cut and dry as it reads out to be. There are caveats in there that needs to be pried open with lots of muscle. It’s hard work. They give you the ingredients. But, the things that they don’t tell you is that you’re supposed to churn it into a fine meal. Otherwise, you just end up with a sloppy mess. In my case, I’ve never been a good cook, so I should have just stayed away from the kitchen. They are not for me. However, on a particularly drab day, it does give me hope that things will get better.

via GIPHY

We all like to believe there’s a little bit of magic in the world. We’ve been molded by everything around us to believe in something bigger than us. The Movies we watched growing up, Hocus Pocus, Practical Magic made us fervently hope that we can cast a spell and turn our lives around, mold it to the best enchanting shape we can muster with our wands. The toys we played with made us inadvertently believe that we can tell what’s going to befall us in the next second.

We’d all like to know what will happen to us in the near future. Where our life is heading. The unknown is dreary and cold. So we ardently hold on to the hope that someone or something will tell us what’s out there. In a way, we’ll always be the little kids waiting for our parents to check under the beads for monsters. The difference is when we grow up we latch on to any contraption, any being — metaphysical or otherwise — that will provide us the assurance that there are no proverbial monsters hiding under the beds. The knowing is better than walking into the great abyss of the unknown, right? So, reading the horoscope is like walking into it armed and loaded to face whatever demons are waiting for you. Sometimes, there are probably no demons at all!

But if you just go by your horoscope, trust me you’ll just be walking in with a knife while you find yourself in the middle of a gunfight. So, my advice would be to just not go by the pretty words. While hope is good, just know that it’s you who can change your fate and not a dude with a pen and an overactive imagination and a proverbial dart that sometimes hits the mark.

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Author

Anjala Farahath