Mercury is in retrograde. Normally, the planet Mercury appears to travel from west to east across the night sky. But right now, Mercury will is traveling westward. If you could watch it happen all at once, Mercury appears to slow down its movement, stop, reverse direction, slow down, stop, then reverse direction again.
How is that even possible, you ask? It’s an optical illusion. It’s a combination of concepts like three dimensions and parallax at work. It’s the same sort of thing as when you travel down a highway and notice closer objects appear to travel faster than further objects. Add three dimensional rotation to the mix and you’ll get some pretty weird phenomena like that.
So what’s the point of all of this? The point is that you’re looking at problems all wrong.
You see, although we’re three dimensional creatures, we only see the world in two dimensions. While our eyes trick us into seeing things with depth and distance, we really only see a flat image. Two dimensions.
So we’ll see Mercury stop its motion in the night sky and start traveling the wrong way. We can’t wrap our heads around it. We can’t see an outside perspective of Earth and Mercury rotating around the sun at different RPMs. We can’t see that nothing actually changed…it was just our perspective that changed.
Too often, we see a problem and take it at face value. “I don’t have enough money to accomplish this.” Or, “I don’t have the time to make this happen.”
Those are two-dimensional problems. You have your goal, and your limitation. But there are thousands of other factors that can be manipulated. Maybe you don’t need the money. Maybe you don’t need the time. Maybe you just need something else that you already have to solve your problem.
I encourage you to start looking at problems and challenges as more than just two dimensional. Start looking at what you do have. Add those to the mix. You might find out that problem is actually an opportunity.
