Saturn Returns! (And Brings the Pain You Crave)

I sent a link to this blog to a friend recently, and his response was this: "damn boy, don't you know the attention span of this generation is about a 30 second clip on you tube?"  I've never intended to go the route of mass appeal here--wouldn't know how to begin--but perhaps 1,800 words on the esoteric aspects of a metaphorical and/or metaphysical Chinese 'organ' was a bit much.  I plan on continuing with the organ posts, if only to satisfy my own obsessive-compulsive tendencies, but I'm gonna try to balance out each of those with something more personal, funny, or spontaneous.  Starting...now.  Right.  Um.  Seems I'm out of practice.  But seeing as how this blog started out as an open journal of sorts, I s'pose I'll talk about, well, me.  Or, rather, myself and most every other late twenty something I know.  Yes, here are the inklings of a topic coalescing out of the stew of thoughts--the Predicament of Generation Something.  Or is it the Predicament of Ze Modern Age (supply French accent here). 


Today I was talking with Alex--old friend and current room-mate and chief co-conspirator--and we realized that our culture tells us that we should have the best of everything.  Not just cars and gadgets but less tangible and mass-producible things (like relationships) ought to be new and shiny, the latest model.  With my gourmet tendencies, I'm pretty well embroiled in this paradigm: I am impelled to sample everything, it seems, and pick out the rarest, the tastiest, the most refined.  Our (the 'we' being privileged white folks, mostly) precious liberal arts colleges present smorgasbords: a little econ, a little bio, a bit of ethnomusicology.  Sample it all!  I don't entirely miss the point of a Well-Rounded Education, but it's a problem when it's so round as to be hollow.  When there's nothing at the heart of it to make it all cohere and mean something, dammit.  So that it's not considered abnormal to reach the age of twenty-two with little idea of one's place in the world, one's role.  I mean, I know 15 year olds in Nepal who are much more mature in many ways than a lot of the 25 year olds I've met, myself included.  And these kids may not have so much as a tenth grade education.  Education is an incredible privilege, I realize, and it's given me the time and space to stumble upon what I see as my own path.  I can't complain too much.  But it seems very much that my stumbling onto whatever it is I stumbled onto here happened between the cracks of my education.  I mean, looking back on my college years, with the notable exception of a few specific classes and the pivotal semester in Darjeeling, it was the walks in the woods and the homebrewing and the hours spent cooking in my off-campus apartment that had more to do with setting my feet on the path than the actual studies did.      


Good golly, this is getting out of hand already.  Higher education is not really my intended target.  Contain yourself, Jonny.  Be reasonable.  Be nice.  At least be concise.  I was getting around, somehow, to this predicament of ours, and I hadn't gotten so far as deigning to say just what the predicament might be.  It's an elaborate confection, composed of some combination of aimlessness, jadedness, laziness and malaise.  It comes in a million different permutations and varying degrees, but it's a pretty common factor amongst the youf dese days.  You know.  The youf.  From where I sit, it has a lot to do with the lack of an orienting perspective on the world.  We have too much data coming in and not enough of a framework to make sense of it.  We have too much in general.  Too much knowledge, too many choices.   Confronted with a million different models of how to live life, we're caught like in the "paradox of choice" as if we were standing in aisle twelve, staring down a wall of breakfast cereal choices (Props to psychologist Barry Schwartz, who has researched and named this phenomenon).  Tugged in one direction of another by inclination, accident, passion and necessity, we're each in a different boat, we young whippersnappers.  We all have inklings of how we might want to live when we grow up, probably even convictions about some things.  But we're often duped into thinking we can have it all, and end up with none of it.  The grass is greener on the other side, so we run panting from one yard to another like the Pericardium puppy (remember him?).  And when we sense that this is a lie, that green is good enough, greener a trap, and greenest an illusion, we find we haven't been given and haven't developed the tools we need to start doing the Work, whatever that may be.  In my experience, that's where a lot of 27 year olds are at.  Starting to realize that we can't have it all, so we'd better have a little bit of something rather than a tiny taste of everything, since ultimately that amounts to a big fat nothing.  To dip into English's rich cache of cliches, this is the time when we recognize we have to fish or cut bait, shit or get off the pot, go aboard who's going aboard.  All this requires some difficult to come by traits, though, such as commitment and faith.   Sound old-fashioned, don't they?  I am not aware of any new and improved substitute for them, however.  


Those who resonate with astrology's particular symbolic language like to talk about the years from roughly 27-30 as the "Saturn return."  It's when Saturn, the slowest moving of the planets, returns to his natal position and closes off a major life cycle.  Masses of anecdotal evidence suggest that ask someone in their thirties about what it was like to be 29 and you'll usually get a big exhalation or a shake of the head and a "well, let me tell you..." Now in general Saturn is not the most well-loved of the planets, being associated with the drying up of all that is juicy.  He's harsh, it is true, and seems to like to punish.   But Saturn is badly misunderstood.  He's the responsible older brother, or OK, the responsible but weird, reclusive foreign uncle, but either way he just wants what's best for you.  Really.  He wants you to stop messing around and do the hard work to fulfill your potential, and he'll pull out all the stops to jumpstart this process--usually at around age 27, if one hasn't gotten with the Saturnian program already.  In Southasia, where astrology is generally much better studied and better integrated into the culture than here, Saturn (known as Shani, the slow mover) is greatly and widely feared and respected.  He is understood as the force that ripens one's stock of old karma, generally difficult old karma, thus bringing the challenges and hardships out of which strength and direction--and maybe even faith and commitment--are born.  He's recognized as great, the greatest of the planetary archetypes.  There's an excellent little book translated and annotated by Ayurvedic luminary Robert Svoboda called The Greatness of Saturn which pretty much sums it up.  


My experience of Saturn has been fairly considerable ever since the age of 20 or so and is only intensifying as the Saturn return looms.  Saturn has brought a drying up and a focusing in for which I am deeply thankful, though it hasn't always been fun.  I have him to thank for whatever direction, focus, and commitment I've managed to consolidate thus far; and while it's only a start, at least it's a start.  What I have learned about Saturn in the process can be summed up as follows: do the work, or get worked.  Saturn wants nothing more than for you to get busy with your life's work, and the further you are from there, the more it's going to take to put you on track.  But you can avoid some of the more devastating manifestations of Saturn energy by exercising focus and discipline in your day-to-day.  It starts with letting go of the greener grass and getting real familiar with the hue of your local flora.  It continues with putting most if not all your eggs in the one basket (the one you've been weaving in Underwater Basket Weaving 201).  Making the sacrifice of everything else you could be doing in that time and cultivating something in you every day, whether it's perfecting your basket-weaving or playing the baritone kazoo.  Where it goes from there I don't know.  Hopefully in the eventual direction of mastery, satisfaction, and success.  A leap of faith here.  Well, let's all keep each other posted as we bump along the road.