II. Hope Math
Second in a short series on time, transits, and the work.
This essay applies to all people who experience events (all humans???) — so, not just for the artmakers and craftspeople amongst us.
The deeper you go into astrology as a meaning-making system, the more you see how the drudgery of living is mostly unavoidable.
I bet this is true for all meaning-making systems; no amount of prosperity gospel preaching can keep the worst of life's experiences from happening. And, just like the dates we can foresee as being fortuitous (like a Jupiter return!), we can see how short or long a tough season of life will be.
In sessions, when I hear a client comment on one of these challenging time periods, I want to calculate for them what I call hope math. I calculate this hope math for myself often. To me, it helps to know something will end. Even if it’s not going to end for months. Or years.
I am assuming, when I talk about this, that transits do have a felt experience in our lives. You may never subscribe to this way of thinking. And it is not my job to convince anyone of that. After tracking transits closely for myself and for clients, though, I can say I feel it.
The first essay in this series I’m unofficially calling Time Magic was about meeting the energy a transit is offering — the practice of noticing when a transit is calling upon something inside of you. Not every transit influences your experience intensely, but you will know when it does. Some transits are super short. In just a few minutes you may feel a hit of insight (like in a Mercury cazimi aspecting a personal planet of yours). But some transits cause shifts in your life whether you’re prepared for them or not — like how having a “fast summer” in Portland, dating a comedian, living in an attic, suddenly working for international car commercial campaigns, laughing outside of the comedy clubs until 3am, dancing, feeling connected to the whole world, and then WHAM it’s over — might be connected to a 3-month-long transit in your chart. Or my chart. What were we talking about? Got lost there for a bit in Reflective Astrology Land.
When I sit with clients and talk about transits affecting their lives — making connections to how it is feeling in their bodies and in their practices — it can be really difficult to be told that a difficult transit is going to last another year. Or another few months. A Chiron transit especially, because Chiron is slow.
What Hope Math Does
Hope math is what I do then. It is helpful to me to know that the experience will be over someday and is not a forever condition. Without the date, the difficulty is a condition I’m “stuck with.” With the date, it is a season, and seasons have transition periods.
Something shifts in my mentality if I know the difficulty will end. It helps me lean in. It helps me know that this moment of catalyst or slowing down or tenderness or emotional excavation can be made into a purpose. If the transit is calling for more deliberate rest, I can give myself the conscious task of practicing rest that is actually restorative. Instead of pushing through (my default mode, it seems).
I want to avoid assuming every difficult thing is a lesson. I also try not to take every positive thing as a blessing. If the framework is the hard things are teaching me, then I have to ask what the easy things are doing too.
The transit that taught me hope math most clearly was Saturn opposing my natal Mars that began last summer and ended just a couple weeks ago. That is a hard one, especially for the body. For me it was a long stretch of unpredictable mobility issues — the kind where you do not know on a given morning whether your body will let you do anything at all. Cue: interrogating my internalized ableism.
But it helped! When I looked up the dates, I found when the opposition would perfect for the last time. And I started counting down.
When I was in my MFA program, the thesis presentation was talked about from day one. We had two years to make something we were proud of. The summer between the first and second year, I was crying almost every day, trying my hardest to write something that would affect a reader. If I had been told another year was added to the timeline, I might have cracked. Because there was no way to contain that level of pressure for longer than I was told I had to. The date was what made the duration survivable.
Maybe this is how hope math feels. For you? For me?
It also works backward. When I reflect on a particularly difficult experience, I can anticipate what planet was applying pressure to which planet, and go look for it in the chart. The reflection itself transports me. It says: I was not imagining the pressure. It was just "in my head."
Okay But How?
I made a guide to walk us all through how to do this for ourselves (linked below).
So: when the transit is hard, look up when it perfects for the last time. Write the date down — put it in the Google Cal or your planner.
I think it helps to name how you’re feeling right now without looking at the charts. Get clear on how it’s affecting you and your life. Something like: I am in a stretch where my body is unreliable. I am in a stretch where the work is not moving. I am in a stretch where I cannot find my footing. The naming is part of the practice. It asks you to decide what the season actually is, instead of letting it stay diffuse.
Then, find the transit that fits. The harder ones are usually slow — Saturn, Chiron, sometimes Pluto, Uranus, or Neptune — making aspects to your personal planets or your ascendant.
If you do not yet have the chart literacy to find this, I built a free guide for that: Hope Math — Finding the Date ↗
If you want help finding the date the hard transit ends, I’d love to help with this. Book a reading: either a live, virtual astrological interpretation or a written interpretation.
Next week’s essay is about stitching your projects to a transit to ride that energy 🏄🏻.
Oh! Also, Chelsea Owens and I talked about transits and parts activations on Parts & Charts last week. Unplanned correlating ideas!
Or maybe my unconscious has just been circling this idea for a while.
This is Part Deux and a series of… 5? 6? Read the first part here:
New to Astrology for Makers? Here’s some posts worth visiting: