Keeping a decision journal

The essay opens with two studies. In 1972, before Nixon's trips to China and the Soviet Union, two researchers asked people to guess in numbers how the trips would go. Asked afterwards to recall their own guesses, people remembered numbers that had drifted towards what actually happened. And students who wrote down where they were when the Challenger space shuttle broke apart gave confident but different accounts about three years later.

The same editing happens to a reading. Try writing down what the last astrologer told you. Most of us can manage a few lines, and half of those lines are really about what happened later. Memory does not store a recording. It stores a summary, and the summary keeps getting edited by the person who now knows how things turned out. This is normal. It happens to everyone.

The fix is boring and it works. Keep a small notebook.

Before a reading, write four lines: the decision and its deadline, what you expect to be told, what you will do if you are told that, and the sentence you would least like to hear. Afterwards, write three: what was actually said in their words, what you decided to do, and how the hour felt. Put a date at the top for when you will read it again.

A year of this points in two directions. Sometimes the astrologer comes out better than your memory of them: you find they refused to tell you what to do, and the decision you have been blaming on them was yours. Sometimes they come out much worse: a promise with a date on it that quietly failed, or the same vague sentences turning up in three different readings.

And sometimes the entry is fine and the next page is empty, because you never did the thing you wrote down.

The notebook is not for scoring astrology. Counting hits and misses is the wrong way to judge this, and it pushes you towards astrologers who make dated promises. What the notebook is for is seeing, in writing, who was actually doing the deciding.