Mercury Retrograde: Disappearing Acts, Mistakes and Misperceptions

 

Article © 2023 by Joyce Mason

 

There’s one thing I like a lot about Mercury Retrograde. I affectionately call the goof reveal factor. It’s a time where I uncover mistakes in my checking account, errors in thinking, or out-and-out misperceptions.

Yesterday’s reveal cracked me up. A couple of months ago, a favorite restaurant at a strip mall I frequent disappeared and was replaced by an AT&T store. No warning. No explanation. Nothing. I texted my niece Dawn to commiserate. She also loves this place. We ate there together often.

What was really weird about it? When I went to Trader Joe’s a about a month later, the restaurant was back. Huh?

To me nothing was odder than a store closing and reopening in the same place or the disappearance of a popular electronics store virtually overnight. I contemplated the possibilities and almost thought it to death before I finally let it go.

Yesterday I went to the strip mall from a different direction than usual and saw the AT&T sign from a distance. (Wait. It’s back?) That was my first clue that I had perhaps been “seeing things.” Driving into the mall with new eyes, I realized that the AT&T store is by Michael’s craft store and Zupas, the restaurant, is in the next nook over across from Trader Joe’s. I must have been at Michael’s thinking it was the site of Zupas when I perceived it as having disappeared. It never left. I just had the wrong location in my mind. I laughed at myself.

I was almost afraid to tell Dawn for fear she’d put me in a “home.” She mercifully reminded me that the two little cul-de-sacs housing both of those anchor stores look almost identical, not to mention being next to each other off the main access road.  Add the fact that I have lived back in Chicago less than two years and am still becoming familiar with my suburban area. While I felt a little less crazy from my niece’s reassurance that I had made a mistake that was easy to make, it made me contemplate how much we might miss in life or hurt ourselves by misperceptions. This was a little one that had virtually no effect but to send me to another restaurant on a couple of occasions. That turned out to be a great detour and gave me another good choice for lunch while shopping in that area.

However, we build our lives and attitudes on how we perceive things. Sometimes we are just off. For instance, almost every personal conflict I have had with a significant other is based on misunderstanding and/or misperception. So what could be more important?

One of the reasons people resist change so much is that our lives are built on ideas formed by our perceptions. Pulling out a key perception can make a whole stack of our life’s building blocks tumble like the tower in a game of Jenga.  We may have built our life on that structure, and the thought of starting from Square or Block 1 is overwhelming. Not to mention feeling foolish for never seeing the error of our ways.

Consider using Mercury Retro’s goof reveal factor to your advantage. If you have important finances, decisions or relationships that feel like they might need going over with a fine tooth comb, use the retrograde cycle to review and relook--and where ever possible, view it from a different angle. Also, just be aware that this is a time where such revelations may occur spontaneously like the missing restaurant did for me. Watch for them.

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