Man, I remember looking at that thing, whatever it was back then, and just feeling totally lost. You know that feeling when someone throws a huge concept at you, like it’s supposed to be obvious, but your brain just does a hard stop? Yeah, that was me. It felt like trying to figure out when a giant, slow-moving planet was doing its dance in some far-off corner of the sky. Like, how would you even begin to track something so big, so intangible?
I mean, I’m talking about a project that landed on my desk. A real monster. Everyone else seemed to get it, or at least they nodded like they did. But for me, it was just a mess of tangled threads. No clear start, no obvious end. Just a big, complex blob of information that needed to be, well, understood. That’s where my own “Pluto in Sagittarius” moment kicked in. It wasn’t about stars, but about this huge shift I had to make in my head to even begin to grasp it.
I started by just staring at it. Literally. I had all these documents, diagrams, notes from meetings. I’d spread them out all over my dining table. My cat thought it was a new play area, jumping from stack to stack. I’d pick one up, read a few lines, then just put it down again. Nothing was sticking. My brain felt like a sieve. I knew if I kept doing that, I’d get nowhere fast. So, I pushed everything aside.
Getting My Hands Dirty
My first real step? I just started drawing. Not pretty pictures, mind you. Just boxes and arrows. I grabbed a huge whiteboard, the kind with wheels that barely fit through the door. I’d scribble down everything I remembered, every little piece of jargon, every tiny process. No order, just dumping it all out of my head. It looked like a crazy person’s wall, I swear.
Then, I moved things around. I’d draw a box for one component, then another for something else, and then try to connect them. Most of the time, the arrows went nowhere. Or they pointed back to themselves. It was a mess, but it was my mess. I was physically engaging with the problem instead of just letting it wash over me. I’d stand there for hours, just moving dry-erase markers across the board. My arm would ache by the end of the day.
I realized I needed to go smaller. Instead of trying to connect everything, I picked just two tiny parts that seemed vaguely related. I made them talk to each other, on paper first, then in a tiny test environment. I’d write a small bit of code, run it, see what broke. And oh boy, did things break. I swear I saw more error messages during that period than in my entire career combined. Every single failure was a tiny piece of information, though. It told me what didn’t work, which was just as important as knowing what did.
- I built a tiny piece of the system.
- I broke it.
- I fixed it.
- I broke it again, differently.
It was like playing with building blocks, but every block was invisible until you tried to stack it. I kept a notebook, just for the errors. I’d write down the error, then what I tried to fix it, and if it worked. This wasn’t some fancy dev log; it was my battle journal. Sometimes I’d just write “Darn it!” or “What even IS this?” next to a particularly stubborn bug.
The Pieces Start to Click
Slowly, ever so slowly, patterns started to emerge. After weeks, maybe months, of this relentless poking and prodding, I started to see connections that weren’t there before. It wasn’t a lightning bolt moment, more like watching a really slow sunrise. You notice the sky getting brighter, but you can’t pinpoint the exact second it stopped being dark.
I remember one morning, I woke up, and for the first time, I could actually visualize the whole thing in my head, not as a blob, but as a structure. It wasn’t perfect, still fuzzy around the edges, but it was there. I jumped out of bed, ran to the whiteboard, and started drawing again, but this time, the boxes and arrows flowed. They connected. They made sense. It was like I’d finally learned the language of this complex system, after struggling with every single word for so long.
It wasn’t about memorizing every detail. It was about seeing the big picture, the flow, the underlying logic. It was about understanding the relationship between all the parts, rather than just what each part did. That’s when I truly “understood it.” It wasn’t about knowing when Pluto was doing its thing in some constellation; it was about navigating my own personal cosmic shift, by just getting my hands dirty and being stubborn enough to keep at it, even when I felt completely lost.
