I was tipped off by a friend last week that “all the stars are lining up at the moment” and the heavens, apparently, look now the way they did before some of the greatest upheavals in our history. After checking, it would appear there is some truth to this: as Pluto (which apparently takes about “248 years to lap the sun”) has currently settled into Aquarius. If you ignore the mildly saucy and nonsensical undertones of this sentence, the punchline is that the last time Pluto was there was 1777 to 1798 - the same period that saw the American, French and Haitian Revolutions unfold. There are some additional cosmic alignments should you wish to explore this further but, suffice it to say, astrologers have for a few years now been calling this current era we’re in something of a “new world order”.
The connotations of an actual New World Order can take us down conspiracy theory rabbit holes. The founding of the Illuminati, that favourite of conspiracy theorists, in 1776 (on the cusp of Pluto making its move on Aquarius) could merely be coincidental timing, or something more pointed. I’m in no position to navigate these rabbit holes and, in any case, my instinct with all this is that if you draw on any twenty-year window in history, you’ll find a war, a revolution or the collapse of something in it. That said, I do enjoy the serendipity of all of these planetary rumours - if nothing else, because they underscore the need we all have for change. I think change is good, and it’s certainly constant. In government, in leadership, at home, and throughout society - whether it comes blustering in, or simply sets in gradually. A change of heart, a change in attitude, a change of scene – we rely on all such things. And while some changes can be challenging, many can also be reassuring and uplifting.
If we’d actually wanted another omen about the changing times we’re living in, last week’s Microsoft outage marked an impromptu (and slightly ominous) moment of its own. It began on Thursday afternoon, US time, and rolled on into Friday the 13th, no less, knocking out Outlook, Teams and Copilot for millions of people in more than 70 countries. My own theory (that Jensen Huang had rung Bill Gates asking him to “cause some sort of global distraction” from Nvidia’s headline-stealing week) gained a bit of well-deserved traction in the pub later that day - however I don’t think I'll be topping the conspiracy theorist charts anytime soon. What was great about the outage was the change in routine it would likely have forced on millions of offices, prompting people to leave their screens and actually talk to one another. The friends I met that evening confirmed that, yes, there had been more human-to-human interaction in their offices because of the outage. Still, they also admitted that being freed from a day of emails, and not having to perform in the usual pantomime of the workplace, was too exhilarating for them to be able to concentrate on work at all.
Going back to the idea of star alignment, Shakespeare threw down plenty of useful insights about it, in more than one of his works. During my last year of school we did a deep dive on King Lear - a steaming whopper of a play (as many critics have since called it) - with a multitude of lines still quoted today. Lear himself has most of the standout moments, although the play’s main villain, Edmund, has a great scene I’ve always liked, in which he talks about “the excellent foppery of the world.” I remember walking around the school fields at break-time reciting it in full. For those who’ve not read it, Edmund is the Earl of Gloucester’s illegitimate son, and he resents it: his legitimate brother Edgar stands to inherit everything, and Edmund nothing. So he forges a letter suggesting Edgar is plotting to kill their father, and makes sure Gloucester finds it. Gloucester takes the bait and immediately blames the sky: “These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us.” Then he storms off and, left alone on stage, Edmund laughs at his father’s planetary excuses:
While Edmund is cast as the villain, his idea that people are prone to fabricating all sorts of whimsical ideas, as a way of dodging the blame for who they are, is spot on.
During the early 1600s, when Shakespeare was writing, astrology wasn’t necessarily new, but I think Edmund was ahead of his time. It was only a matter of years after King Lear that Galileo Galilei emerged with his revelations about our place in the cosmos. Galileo reset things by helping to show that the solar system doesn’t revolve around us – far from it. Yet, perhaps because of the sheer complexity of the unknown universe (and perhaps, as Edmund suspected, because we too easily lean on such things to excuse our actions), many people still follow the patterns of astrology today. Where some follow these cosmic patterns, others commit to religion or to spiritual pathways as their “guardrails” in life. I increasingly prefer to go on gut instinct and intuition, although the Bible’s suggestion that love and tolerance should be the foundations for going about life in a wholesome way is hard to counter. It seems fitting, then, that today, 16 November, happens to be the UN’s International Day for Tolerance – no planets required - and a good reminder to make room for one another’s ways of seeing the world. So, there we have it. The planets may or may not be lining up for a revolution, and Microsoft may or may not keep the lights on next Friday. Pick your guardrail as you wish and, if you’ve time in your schedule today, why not try tolerating someone or something you’d rather not - if only to escape the inevitable backlog of emails that might be incoming this morning after last week’s minor hiccup. And, if none of that takes your fancy, you could do worse than stick on the aptly titled ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ which has just rather spookily surfaced on my playlist. It’s from The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd’s signature album, which ends, fittingly, with a track called ‘Eclipse’. Have a belter of a day, and see you next week! 
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