When I was in grade school, I often remember my mom sitting at the kitchen table reading. Whether it was the newspaper or a glossy magazine, inevitably she would flip to the horoscopes section. I’m guessing she would read her own and then maybe my dad’s next. She would get to mine and to my brother’s. Depending on what ages we were, or what was happening in each of our lives, maybe the sequence of this changed. Out of plain curiosity, or just superstition, she seemed very attentive to those little paragraphs. If I was in the room, she would fill me in on what she’d learned. There was always revelation in this planetary peek.

Have you ever heard of the notion of a “born age”? It goes something like this: You’re born the age that you’ve always been and will always be. So you go through life at this age–not behind it or catching up to it–but at this personal, perpetual age. And the way you interpret things and act, generally speaking, are from the perspective of this age.