In search of good fortune.

I am addicted to my horoscope. I read it almost everyday, impose meanings on the mundane where they seem to fit and discard what I don’t feel (or want) to be relevant. I’d say that I’m pretty grounded, I’m up to my knees in the earth, and I think of it as a harmless sort of hobby. Much of human energy is given to imagining the future. So no wonder the thought of a future revealed is irresistible…

I did once have my palm read. It was a summer party and we’d all dressed up as hippies or drifters and pinned flowers in our hair. There was a palmist there, offering two-minute prophecies. I didn’t feel too persuaded that she possessed much of a gift, nor that some little imp sat perched on the hoop of her earring whispering my fate into her ear. So I hadn’t paid much attention then, but I have since felt the occasional impulse to have my palm read again. The urge returns when I face complicated decision. And here I am again, at the beginning of a new year and at a liminal stage of my life, thinking about it again.

I don’t want to go all ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ and disappear off to Bali but I did get a number off a neighbour, a probable (possible) palmist, and was told to send a message. I texted the number:

“Hello. Do you do palm readings? K”.

Two days later an answer return, as if from nowhere.

“Hiya, no I don’t. I work through mediumship hun. x”

It was a shame; I liked this friendly-message sending stranger.

I’ve seen a gypsy wagon on the Brighton peer. I thought about getting the train there and had visions of myself roaming the Brighton lanes in the drizzle looking for a chalked up sign saying someone would tell my fortune. But neither that, nor text-messaging mediums fits my imagined meeting with a fortune-teller.

In films I’m sure I’ve seen pink-cheeked girls, hot from summer sun and flirtatious chases down the beach, stumble through a curtain and try to catch their breath as a dark skinned woman with tumbling curls of ebony hair told her of her future, usually of love.

Over the years there have been many famous psychics. Cheiro, an early 20th century Irish clairvoyant and one of the most famous of palm readers, was followed by people such as Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde. He learnt the skill in India, where he met his guru, and studied a book whose pages were made of human skin. Marilyn Monroe had her palm read by a man in a turban in a Beverley Hills Hotel. Now there are more mystics than ever, you can have your future predicted through your computer screen.

Palm reading has existed for thousands of years. Coming from lands in the east with dark-eyed, nomadic gypsies. Gypsy women became known for the tarot cards and crystal balls they used, but they also read faces, palms and tealeaves and palms. It is a skill that has been used by Aristotle and Alexander the great. And Darren Brown.

Our fingerprints we are born with. They form when we are no bigger than a plum in our mother’s womb and we keep them all our lives. They change less than our names will.

A man’s individual character is writ in his hand, so they say. My hands are broad. My sister’s are dainty. My hands are made shaped for kneading bread or digging for potatoes than for playing a piano; that much I can tell you by myself. Our hands are the most dextrous part of the body. Character and daily habit must therefore work itself into the creases; deeper even than the wrinkles on a face.

My history I could have read off my palm, but what about my future?

Here is the problem that I find hard to reconcile. If you can read a life-path off a map on a hand, or a map in the stars of the sky for that matter, then that path is predestined.

There. If my destiny is on my hands then can it also be in my hands?

I already read into the semantics of the world. I am recreationally superstitious; I pick up pennies, count magpies. I found a three of hearts on the pavement last week and I put in my pocket. I haven’t worked out its meaning yet, but I feel it must have one.

And now my intuition tells me not to find out what life has in store. My fear is that I’ll believe too much and then indirectly make it true. If it were possible to find a palm reader who is persuasive, then I would be sure invest some faith in what they say. And then I might be at risk of making things happen in the wrong pattern.

If, for example, I was told that a man in red would break my heart, I might be tempted to avoid the man who drives a red car, wears a red hat, red shirt, red tie. But maybe the man in red is supposed to be a great love of mine that might have been worth the heartbreak. There are many things in life that will cause us pain. We don’t each have the foresight to know what is good for us. Pain is sometimes good for us. I don’t want make the mistake of trying to avoid it, or know its coming.

Anyway, the future is a lonely place if you’re the only one who’s there. Better to stay here now. Until I rush with flushed cheeks off the beach into a gypsy wagon I will struggle through my personal little journey blindly, feeling my way forward with my hands.