Palindrome Reversal

It’s January. Not only that, it’s halfway through January. I have had mixed feelings and thoughts for a while, not feeling them as intensely negative as I used to, but every so often, acutely aware of the lack of progress. In my new mode of finding themes and mantras rather than resolutions, I have come up with one for 2021. Recursive Growth. The thought came to me a few weeks ago, when I had Jackie and her friend Ayaka over for dinner. Ayaka told me that the ages of 27-30 are supposedly very formative, she called it your “Saturn return”. Now I’m not saying I take stock in astrology, but I do believe in the power of manifestation, in the sense that the human brain likes when life naturally rhymes. I think about The Alchemist and how the protagonist in it learns to read the signs from the universe, which it is using to tell him to follow his dreams, because if he refuses the call, eventually they will stop sending signs altogether.

And there are certainly a lot of rhyming going on in this period. I am turning 27 in May, entering my Saturn’s return as Ayaka was kind enough to let me know. The day before that evening was the Great Conjunction, the closest Jupiter and Saturn have appeared in the sky in almost 500 years. This too, in astrological and esoteric beliefs, is a time of great shifts, of polarity reversing. This is also the first year I managed to get my hands on a physical calendar from Kurzgesagt, having always liked their work and the idea of having a calendar year that begins at the start of the Human Era, i.e. 12,000 years ago. I didn’t notice it when I bought the calendar, but in their version of the dates, this year is a palindrome: 12021.

The themes of reversal, reflection, and returning are coming on strong, and always accompanied by themes, almost counterintuitively, of growth, independence, and creation. The Saturn’s return is a reflective period, but the period in which a person becomes truly themselves; the period is the final growing pains of maturity. I have to admit—with evidence, since I maintain a pretty comprehensive dream journal— that around October or November, I began having a strange trend in my dreams that support these dual themes. I have always found it interesting to keep track of where I am in dreams. I never had a real “home” so when I am in a place from my childhood, it could be in any array of locations; the ones my subconscious chooses, and what I do there, can often be revelatory to my current emotional state, or wellbeing. One that I dread but find myself in often is LFA. I was a teenager, first meeting girls and friends, making so many mistakes, so many memories. Its not unusual, I think, for people to have dreams about being back in school. It’s a shared, cultural trauma, really; everyone has dreams about going into a test or classroom and realizing to their horror that they hadn’t studied, or hadn’t gone to any of the classes that semester, or were in the wrong room, etc. I have had plenty of these, for years, and often wake up embarrassed to know that I am still so woefully attached to the primal emotional memories I have of wanting to fit in there, or of wishing I could go back and do it all over. Maybe less common for most people is that my back-to-school dreams often involve moving back into the boys dorm. Possibly uncommon, too, is that even though I frequently have dreams where I get false memories, I almost always am the age in the dream that I am in real life, dreading that I have to return to high school, and often having the dream end when I realize “wait, this doesn’t make any sense!” The change that happened a few months ago was this: I stopped having dreams about LFA. It’s not that the stopped, rather I had two very distinct, and very irregular dreams about LFA, and haven’t had a single one since. The two dreams were somewhat similar to each other, separated by about a week, and almost seemed to be portraying moments from the same event, separated by a few hours. In the dreams, I was dressed up, and attending some sort of celebration, or sending off. It felt a lot like a graduation, and would make sense given the location, but everyone seemed only to be congratulating me, not anyone else from my class. Everyone was there to send me off, specifically. I greeted old friends and enemies with hugs and tears, and we made a procession off to the formal gardens. I don’t have any memories of the event itself, but the first dream seemed to take place before, and the second one after. In the later, we were out by the soccer fields, sitting in the grass…. And the sun was coming down. No one said it but there was the distinct feeling that someone, or something was saying ”It is time”.

There is one more connection to the second of the dual themes. The calendar sets before me a year since the start of the Human era, 12,000 years ago. Some friends and I recently started a reading club, not to read the same books, but to encourage each other to read a book a week. Quickly running out of books I have just laying around, before I need to start buying one’s I haven’t read yet, I grabbed a copy of Ishmael that Ethan had given me when he came to stay with me a whole year ago. The book gave me a rush of fresh inspiration. Though some of it can be very philosophy 101, there is so much to praise about it. One aspect is the emphasis on a story we tell ourselves, as a culture. And where that story began. In Ishmael’s reckoning, the start of the end was the agricultural revolution, which he also says is still ongoing—it is a revolution against the Gods themselves, an attempt to take the world out of their hands and put it in our more capable hands instead. Reading it, I looked at my calendar in a new light. Reflection, Return, but also forward moving, creative force. A palindrome showing that we are on the edge of change. I am on the edge of change. And the key is reflection. Build out, by recursing, looking inward.

Breaking down the theme even further, I want to give myself smaller pieces to work with. So the end of this winter, and the spring, leading up to my birthday, my theme is Preparing for the Reversal. In this time, I am focusing on giving myself the tools and insights necessary to undergo the tremendous change. In Tibetan buddhism it is believed that without practicing meditation in your life, the transcendent peace of mind passing through the 5th bardo will make you unable to differentiate reality from illusion, and you will miss your chance at seeing the true, clear light, and will be doomed to return to a life of dualistic reality. So too, do I want to make sure that I do not miss my chance at the true light—Though, similarly, it would not be the last time, only another rotation of the spheres.

To prepare for the reversal, I am reading every day, I am writing letters, coding when I can, and reflecting. Reflecting on relationships, on friendships, on the things I value, on the life I am living, on the pathologies I have developed, grown into or out of. Ultimately, I am willing to face the horrors of the wrathful gods, as well as the pleasures of the peaceful ones, and will look past them at what my life truly means, and how to express it in a way that will satisfy me, truly.