Keeping a decision journal

A decision journal is four lines written before a reading and three after it, and it exists because your memory of the hour quietly edits itself once you know how things turned out. That is not a suspicion about you; it is a measured effect. In 1972, before Richard Nixon travelled to China and to the Soviet Union, two researchers, Baruch Fischhoff and Ruth Beyth, asked people to guess, in numbers, how those trips would turn out. Afterwards, the same people were asked to remember the numbers they themselves had written. The remembered numbers had moved. They leaned towards whatever had in fact happened.

The second study is sadder. Immediately after the Challenger shuttle broke apart in January 1986, Ulric Neisser had students write down where they were when they heard. He asked the same students again about three years later. Many were confident, and many of the confident accounts did not match their own handwriting.

Neither study is about astrology. Both are about the thing every reading depends on afterwards, which is your account of what you were told.

The same editing has been going on in your own file. Try to set down what the last astrologer you sat with actually said to you, the sentences rather than what they meant, and if you are anything like me what arrives is short. Four lines, perhaps five, and at least two of them are really about what happened in the months afterwards. That is not a memory of the hour. It is a summary. And it was written later, by the person you became once you already knew how things turned out, so it has been quietly tidied.

This is ordinary, and it is not a failure of attention. You were listening. What memory keeps is not a recording, and whatever it does keep stays open to correction by everything that happens next.

The repair is dull, and it works. Write it down at the time.

Records are not new to this field, though they have usually sat on the wrong side of the table. Between 1596 and 1634 two English astrologer-physicians, Simon Forman and Richard Napier, wrote up their consultations case by case: who came, what was asked, the hour of the asking, what was judged. A team at Cambridge has spent years turning that paper into a digital archive, and it survives as one of the largest sets of medical records anyone kept in that period. Notice whose book it was. The practitioner kept the record. The person who paid for the hour, and who had to go home and live inside the advice, kept nothing.

Before, and after

The night before, or on the morning itself, write four lines. It should take less time than deciding what to wear.

The first is the decision, in one line, with its two options and the date by which the world decides for you if you do not. That line is the whole subject of bring a decision, not a fear, and everything here stands on it. If you cannot write it, the page has told you something already, and the reading has not started.

The second is what you expect to be told. Guess. Write the guess down even though it feels childish, because a guess on paper is the only thing about this evening that you can later be wrong about.

The third is what you will do if you are told that. One sentence, with a verb in it.

The fourth is the sentence you would least like to hear. My guess is that you know it already, word for word, and that you have never once put it on paper. On paper it is smaller than it is at two in the morning.

The birth papers that go with all this, and the provenance of your birth time, belong to the errand described in what to bring, and I would rather send you there than repeat it. The four lines are the smaller and stranger half of the file. They are the only part of it that is about you rather than about the sky.

Then, the same evening, or the next at the latest, three more.

What was said, in their words, marked as theirs. Two or three sentences is plenty, and the ones to keep are the ones you would not have arrived at on your own. Where you are putting it in your own words, say so on the page. In 11 months you will not remember which words were whose, and that uncertainty is exactly what the entry exists to prevent.

What you decided to do, with the date you decided it.

And one line on how the hour felt. Lighter or heavier, unhurried or rushed, attended to or sold to. Feelings settle nothing about the sky, but a year of that one line will tell you more about the practitioner than any accuracy score could.

Then put a date at the top of the entry: the morning you intend to open it again. Three months for most things, a year for anything slow. The page is now addressed to a specific future person, which is the whole trick.

Two directions

When you do open it, the record can embarrass either party. You should want it to be able to embarrass both, and it is worth knowing in advance that it more often embarrasses the reader.

Sometimes the reading holds up better than your memory of it. Suppose you have spent a year telling people that the astrologer told you to wait. The page says he refused to tell you anything of the sort. He described the daśā (दशा), the stretch of years the method labels with a planet's name, as one that seemed to reward finishing things rather than starting them. He said twice that the choice was yours. He named a cost you had since forgotten you were warned about. The waiting was your decision. You attached his name to it because a decision with somebody else's name on it is lighter to carry, and you have been carrying it in the lighter form ever since. That is a real finding, and it is not about him.

Sometimes it holds up much worse. The page carries a dated promise, an event placed inside a particular month, and the month came and went without your noticing, because by then there was a newer reading and the old one had retired without a fuss. Or it shows a warning that went on to organise a year of your behaviour, and only the record makes the size of that year visible. Or, most commonly, it shows three sentences so general that no outcome could have contradicted them, and you turn back two entries and find the same three sentences in different handwriting from a different person.

And sometimes, least comfortably, the entry is fine on both sides and the following page is empty. You wrote: I will put the flat on the market after Diwali. It is now February. Nobody misled you. You simply did not do it, and without the page you would have remembered the year as one in which the decision was somehow still open.

That is what the journal really is: a way of seeing, in writing, who was actually doing the deciding. Nobody has to grade the astrology. The book asks a smaller question, and it asks it about you: whether the reasons you acted on are ones you could still recognise as your own 12 months later. It also shows up advice that took the choice away from you. The line about what you were told runs long, and the line about what you decided to do is empty.

A year of this teaches something, and it is rarely what people sit down expecting. You may find that you have asked the same question four times with different nouns in it. You may find that the sentence which actually helped was never the one you had gone there for, and that it usually arrived in the first ten minutes, before any chart was open. You may find that you decide by exhaustion, or by deadline, or by whoever spoke to you last on a Sunday. None of that is astrological information. All of it is expensive to learn any other way.

Do not turn it into a scoreboard. Counting hits and misses is the wrong way to judge this. Practised honestly, the method does not make the kind of claim a tally can catch. And once you start keeping score, you will drift towards practitioners who give you something to score, which means the ones who make dated promises. Your book is not a verdict on jyotiṣa (ज्योतिष), the old name for this whole field. A handful of hours is not a sample, and you are standing inside it. It is a verdict on your own use of the thing, which is the only verdict available to you and the more useful of the two.

Two warnings about the book itself. It can become one more thing to check. If you notice yourself rereading old entries the way people reread messages, hunting for a feeling rather than a fact, close it and put it somewhere inconvenient. And keep it private. It holds your birth details, your money, the state of your marriage and your handwriting, all in one place. That is not a document to leave where other people keep things for you.

There is no format worth arguing about. A school notebook does it. Four lines, then three, then a date, as often as you actually consult anybody, which for most people is two or three times a year. A year of it is a few pages, and most of them are dull to read.

Open it on a morning when nothing is due. Read the oldest entry before you read what happened next, and stop at the line where you wrote what you expected to be told. That line is the only part of the page you were qualified to write. See how it did.