| There is a line in A Knight’s Tale [2001] that has stayed with me for years: the idea that you can “change your stars”. In the film, those words are really about destiny. William Thatcher is born into a world where birth determines what you are allowed to become. His stars, metaphorically speaking, have already been decided for him, yet he refuses to accept that the circumstances of his beginning must also dictate his ending. Recently, I found myself wondering about those words from a slightly different direction. Can we change our stars, or perhaps more accurately, can we change the person who was supposedly born beneath them? It began with something somebody said to me a few weeks ago: “The way you are, you must be a Scorpio.” I smiled because I am not. I am a Taurus. Ordinarily that would have been the end of it. People guess star signs incorrectly all the time, and astrology is hardly an exact science. Still, then, quite independently, I asked Gertie — the name we use for ChatGPT — a rather curious question. After all the conversations we have had about gardens, business, people, wildlife, memories, relationships and life generally, what star sign would she guess I was purely from my personality? Her answer was Scorpio. Two observers, approaching me from completely different directions, had arrived at the same wrong answer. That interested me far more than whether astrology itself was right or wrong, because there was a time when nobody who knew me well would have had much difficulty finding the bull. |
| Once Upon a Time, I Was Very Much a Taurus When I was in my late teens and early adulthood, I was extremely interested in astrology. I wasn’t simply reading the little horoscope columns tucked away in newspapers either; I used to draw up astrological charts for people and understood considerably more about houses, planets, aspects and signs than I do today. Back then I considered myself very much a Taurean, and the descriptions fitted comfortably enough. Taurus is traditionally associated with being grounded, practical, persistent and loyal. It is an earth sign, which seems almost suspiciously appropriate considering where much of my life eventually led me. There is stubbornness too, of course, and I shall not attempt whatsoever to argue with that one. Yet the young man who studied astrology and recognised himself so readily in Taurus is not entirely the man sitting here today. He hasn’t disappeared, and I don’t believe we ever completely leave our younger selves behind, but life has been working on him for several decades. Some characteristics have strengthened, some have softened, and others have changed their expression so completely that somebody looking at me now apparently sees another sign altogether. Then Came Another Label In 2008 another description entered my life: Asperger’s. I had known from childhood that there was something different about me. I didn’t have a name for it, but I knew that I didn’t always experience people or the world quite as others appeared to. Then came the diagnosis, and there is something strange about receiving a label for something that has always been there. Nothing physically changes. You walk into a room as yourself and walk out again as the same person, yet you leave carrying information about yourself that you didn’t possess when you entered. Suddenly there was an explanation. Not an explanation for everything, because human beings are considerably too complicated for that, but some behaviours, difficulties and ways of thinking began to make more sense. That was eighteen years ago, and the person I am today is very different from the person I was when I received that diagnosis. The autism hasn’t disappeared, nor would I suggest that somebody learns their way out of being autistic. What changed was everything around it: experience, knowledge, age, mistakes, relationships, responsibilities, understanding other people and, perhaps more importantly, gradually understanding myself. That makes me wonder whether personality is ever really the fixed thing we sometimes imagine it to be. What Exactly Are We Describing? This is where astrology becomes interesting to me again, although not in the way it interested the younger me. Suppose astrology worked perfectly. Imagine somebody had drawn up my chart when I was nineteen and produced an extraordinarily accurate description of my personality. What would that chart actually have described? Would it have described me, or merely nineteen-year-old me? Several decades later, the raw materials may still be recognisable, but they have been shaped by everything that has happened since. Stubbornness can become determination, naivety can become caution and suspicion can become discernment. Confidence can be knocked out of us and later rebuilt into something rather different. Things we once feared can become things we barely notice, while qualities we believed were permanent can disappear almost unnoticed because we no longer need them. Personality is less like a photograph and more like a garden. The ground remains, and some plants persist for decades, but others disappear. Things arrive unexpectedly, some thrive, some fail, and occasionally something has to be cut almost to ground level before it grows back into something worth keeping. Stand in the same garden forty years apart, and technically it may be the same place, but nobody could reasonably claim that it hasn’t changed. So Why Scorpio? After revealing that I was actually Taurus, I became curious about why Scorpio had appeared twice. There is a little astrological irony here because Taurus and Scorpio sit opposite one another in the zodiac. Taurus is an earth sign and Scorpio a water sign, but both are regarded as fixed signs, and both are traditionally associated with persistence, loyalty and determination. Both can apparently dig their heels in, although I suspect the bull and the scorpion might disagree about which of them is doing the digging. Scorpio is traditionally regarded as more intense, probing and suspicious of appearances. It wants to know what lies underneath things, and perhaps I recognise more of that in myself today than I would have done when I was younger. I question motives more, analyse people more and am considerably less inclined to accept an explanation simply because somebody has given me one. Experience does that. Once you have lived long enough, you discover that what people say, what people mean and what people eventually do can be three remarkably different things. Perhaps that is what those two observers were seeing. They weren’t necessarily seeing a Scorpio at all. Perhaps they were seeing an older Taurus. Curiously, I Like Scorpios There is one further complication: I tend to get along very well with Scorpios. Perhaps astrology would have an elaborate explanation involving opposite signs balancing one another — earth and water, two fixed personalities approaching the same world from different directions. Perhaps there really is something in that, or perhaps I’ve happened to meet Scorpios whose personalities I like. That’s the trouble with astrology. Once you start looking for patterns, patterns have an extraordinary habit of appearing. Psychology has long recognised something similar: give people sufficiently broad personality descriptions and many of us will find ourselves somewhere within them. I could probably find pieces of Taurus, Scorpio, Virgo and several other signs in myself if I looked hard enough. Yet that doesn’t make the question meaningless. If anything, it makes it more interesting, because perhaps the important question was never whether astrology can tell us who we are, but whether we actually know who we are ourselves. Can We Change Our Stars? I cannot change the date on which I was born. Whatever configuration existed in the heavens at that moment happened once and cannot be rearranged for my convenience, so astrologically speaking I remain Taurus, the bull. But the personality supposedly represented by that bull has travelled a considerable distance. The teenager interested in astrology became the young adult trying to understand why he seemed different from other people. That man eventually received an explanation, and the man who received it then spent another eighteen years living, learning, adapting, succeeding, failing, trusting, becoming disappointed, trying again, and accumulating all the other experiences from which a human personality is constructed. Perhaps there was never a moment when I changed from one person to another. There were thousands of tiny changes instead, most of which probably passed unnoticed. That could be what becoming older actually is: not replacing ourselves, but continually editing ourselves, keeping some passages, rewriting others and occasionally discovering that something we believed about ourselves twenty or forty years ago is no longer true. William Thatcher wanted to change his stars because the world told him those stars determined what he could become. Perhaps most of us perform a quieter version of the same rebellion. We cannot change where we began, remove everything that shaped us, or completely discard the person we once were — and perhaps we shouldn’t want to. But neither are we obliged to remain that person simply because that was the version of ourselves we happened to start as. So no, I haven’t changed my star sign. I am still Taurus. But perhaps changing our stars was never really about changing what hangs above us. Perhaps it is about what happens to us while we are standing underneath them. The bull hasn’t become a scorpion. He’s had a lifetime to become himself. |
| About our writing & imagery Most articles reflect our real gardening experience and reflection. Some use AI in drafting or research, but never for voice or authority. Featured images may show our photographs, original AI-generated artwork, or, where stated, credited images shared by others. All content is shaped and edited by Earthly Comforts, expressing our own views |
The Gardener's Curious Journal 
As another taurean, this was a fascinating post…
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