Saturn’s Return: A Personal Journey of Self-Discovery and Growth
While people used to fear only the midlife crisis, today there’s no time to even think about future crises. We are in a constant state of crisis: quarter-life crisis, 30s crisis, identity crisis, career crisis, crisis, crisis, crisis… But there’s one that’s cyclical: Saturn’s return. I became aware of it recently, as it approached.
Saturn’s return represents one of the most important cycles in a person’s life. It happens every 29–30 years, but its effects can start a little earlier and last a little longer. The visit of someone who appears rarely always ends up having greater importance. As far as I understand (I must point out that I am not an astrologer), you spend about 30 years having various experiences, and when Saturn returns to the same position it was on the day of your birth, it delivers the bill: “So? Did you learn anything in the time I was away?”
“What should I have learned?” is my first question. Geez, 30 years is a long time, I can’t remember everything I lived, let alone what I learned. “Okay, but what if I haven’t learned anything?” was my next question, and in my research, I understood that you spend the next 30 years living the same problems until you learn. And then, with that pressure, I start to reflect. Our first 30 years are countless journeys. We discover the world with the curiosity of childhood, rebel against it with the repulsion of adolescence, and understand that living is more complex than we could imagine with maturity.
I look at each of my adventures, each of my traumas, each of my mistakes, and each of my joys. I still don’t understand the world. Again: did I forget something? Our brain works like an editor, keeping only what is important to the whole. What if the editor was wrong and deleted something that was crucial for me to understand existence? With a wave of a magic wand, I try to recover all the files, looking for something I don’t know what it is. How could something I don’t even remember be so important to the stars? More specifically, to Saturn.
And rummaging through the trash, I find things that were important: dreams I gave up on, loves I left behind, pains I couldn’t deal with, happy moments that were nothing special other than being happy… What are all these doing here? I got rid of you guys so long ago, you should have disappeared!
I sit down and start to uncrumple them all. They are still marked, but they are still what they are. I throw a bucket of water over everything. They say that letting the water run helps to clean. And when I look around, I see that everything everywhere is a mess. Even the things I thought were in place seem out of place when I have a broad view of everything.
Jobs I didn’t want are on the goal shelf. In the “VERY IMPORTANT” pile, I see thousands of insignificant little things. From “the 2014 cell phone” to “person I met at the job I left in 2018”, the shelf seems to have few really important things. At least I’m happy to see my friends and family there. But poor things, they are squeezed in the middle of so much stuff. There’s no way, I need to clean. I take everything that isn’t them and throw it on the floor. It’s time to tidy up the house. If I want to find the lessons Saturn is charging me, first I have to organize these things to have a better view.
When I’m deciding where to start, there comes another disappointment. The job I wanted just for the money doesn’t work out. I hold on to it until I look and remember what I have to do. One more distraction: the bills arrive that will leave me penniless. Focus! Disappointments are great at occupying our thoughts, they just don’t remind us that life goes on. Ah, Saturn!
I’m tired, so I make the decision to start with the small things. I take the tasks of the day and put them in the routine session. I’ve never seen it, just put something there and it disappears in an instant. On the one hand, it’s good: if I don’t put everything at once, clogging everything up, there’s always space and it’s always organized. I find daily dissatisfaction with my appearance. It’s very long and it seems that even being sucked into the routine, it’s always there. You know what? I don’t need that much. I leave it in the trash, one hour it disappears from there. So I hope at least.
I find two files of kindness. They are not heavy, but they do not fit on the shelf of respect for the other. I put one there. I end up dropping the other when I see the shelf of latent pains and traumas. Holy shit! How many things! How did I not see this before? I didn’t even know it was possible to have so many things. Each of the boxes weighs a lot. Some I just can’t get out of there. I take out the ones I can and unwrap them. They were taking up so much space because of the packaging. When I got rid of the ones I could, I saw that inside there were lessons.
Speaking of this section, it was the one with the most space, even though it already had a looooot of stuff. Much more than the pains.
When I had already put a lot of things in place — dreams went back to VERY IMPORTANT and in the end there was room for other things there — I found a shelf of respect for myself. I put the kindness box and also fit a defense box and a preservation box.
In my head, this had all happened so fast. But when I realized it, Saturn was almost leaving. I tried to look at each of the things again, but I wasn’t finding what I should have learned. It was then that I realized that each of those things shone, on all the shelves. They reflected something, and when I moved from side to side, shaking my arms, I understood what it was.
Saturn smiled at me. But I didn’t see it; I was happy to have found myself.
