Looking at an individual transit is like looking at something under a microscope. You can see whatever you’re looking at very clearly and learn a great deal from it. However, whatever you’re looking at is removed from its environment which limits what you see. It’s a great place to begin learning about something because when you understand the components fully you can add them together to form an understanding of the whole. It’s like looking at a single cell on a glass slide. You can see its makeup and how it functions on its own. Then you need to see how it interacts with the other cells in its environment, then the tissue, then the organ, then the body.

At that point you see it’s a grasshopper, that it eats, it moves, it kicks. But you don’t know how it moves in the world till you see it kick against the ground it inhabits, the social structure it interacts with… on and on. Transits are like this. Yesterday I had Venus opposing my Sun and trining my Moon. This is supposed to create a pleasant time… in theory. It probably just kept me off the clocktower with a high-powered rifle, given everything else transiting as well as other elements in my natal chart.

Sometimes people find themselves disappointed when a major transit doesn’t deliver the results they’d hoped for. Jupiter through the 7th should hop up your dating life, yes? Perhaps, but there are lots of other interacting connections to consider. It’s helpful to keep the “under the microscope” facts in mind when exploring transits to your chart, but just like the student scientist you must also learn to take it further.

Another good analogy is in learning to play chess, learning to link moves and see ahead to analyze the possible outcomes. With practice it is possible to link further and further until you can see the whole game played out as each move narrows the possibilities. This is similar to the skill employed in reading charts and it improves with practice.

Hindsight is one of the best teachers in reading a chart. It’s like an experiment in science. When you predict what might happen during a given transit then compare it to what DID happen you are testing a hypothesis. You can then look at the conditions that might have affected your original hypothesis, such as other conditions in the natal chart or a competing energy from another transit. Your inner mad scientist can train up from “curses, foiled again” to “Muahahahahahahaha!”

Have you ever been disappointed when a particular transit didn’t “deliver”?