Why two of my oldest students became two of my greatest teachers
There is something about September that still feels like the beginning of a school year. Even when we are decades removed from classrooms, new pencils, timetables and first-day nerves, September carries that unmistakable sense of beginning again. It asks us to get organized, to refocus, to learn something new.
But somewhere along the way, many adults stop thinking of themselves as students.
We begin to believe that learning belongs to the young. We assume that by a certain age we are supposed to know who we are, what we believe and how the world works. We become less comfortable being beginners, and perhaps a little less willing to admit how much there still is to discover.
Astrology has taught me otherwise.
A few years ago, I worked with the oldest client I had ever had. She was 84 years old.
For most of her life, she had been deeply devoted to the church. She had worked as a church secretary and had spent decades living a life centred around service, faith and responsibility. Then, just before the age of 84, something changed.
Astrologers will immediately recognize the timing: she was approaching her Uranus return. We often talk about the Uranus return as a period of liberation, awakening, disruption and radical change. But because relatively few people reach their Uranus return, it remains one of those astrological cycles that we often discuss more theoretically than experientially.
Her experience was anything but theoretical. Her life suddenly opened in ways she could never have imagined. She began exploring therapeutic psychedelic experiences through an organization in Ottawa, including psilocybin, LSD and MDMA. Her worldview expanded dramatically, she became fascinated with spirituality in an entirely new way, and eventually astrology became part of that awakening.
That is how she found me.
She booked a consultation, and afterward she wrote something I have never forgotten. She told me she could not believe she had not discovered astrology sooner. She could not believe that this kind of “magic,” as she described it, had been there her entire life and she had never thought to use it.
There was grief in that realization. She was aware of time in a way that someone in their eighties understandably might be, and there was a sense of mourning for all the years she had lived without access to something that suddenly felt so meaningful to her.
But there was something else there too.
Excitement. Curiosity. A tremendous zest for learning.
Instead of deciding it was too late, she became a student. She went on to study astrology with me for nearly a year so she could begin using some of the basic principles in her own life.
I have thought about her often since then. As astrologers, we talk about Uranus as the planet of awakening, liberation and freedom. But I am not sure many of us picture an 84-year-old former church secretary radically expanding her worldview, experimenting with altered states of consciousness and then deciding she wants to learn astrology.
And yet, why not?
Why do we assume awakening has an age limit?
She was not the only older student who changed the way I think about learning.
Another student came to me in his seventies.
He had already studied astrology with a well-known astrologer in New York City, but he had not been completely satisfied with the explanations he had received. He wanted something more rigorous, and eventually sought me out specifically because he wanted to study the Morin Method.
He worked with me for a couple of years, and to this day I consider him one of the most intelligent students I have ever taught. He asked the best questions—not easy questions, and not questions designed simply to confirm what he already believed. He asked the kind of questions that forced me to think more deeply about what I was teaching. There were times I had to go away, dig into the material and come back with a better answer. He made me work as a teacher, and I loved that.
We are still in touch, and I continue to have enormous admiration for him.
Those two students were very different people, but both of them taught me the same thing:
There is no expiration date on curiosity.
We do ourselves a tremendous disservice when we begin to think we are too old to learn something new. We are allowed to discover a passion at 40, or 60, or 74, or 84. We are allowed to change our minds. We are allowed to question beliefs we have carried for decades. We are allowed to open a book and realize we know almost nothing about the subject.
And we are allowed to become beginners again.
In fact, I think there is something incredibly alive about doing exactly that.
Astrology is a vast subject. I began studying it more than twenty years ago, and I still encounter things that make me reconsider what I thought I understood. That is part of what keeps it fascinating. Learning keeps us engaged with life. It reminds us that there are still things we have not seen, ideas we have not considered and questions we have not thought to ask.
So perhaps September does not have to belong only to children going back to school. Maybe all of us could use a little back-to-school season.
Take the class. Buy the notebook. Read the book. Ask the question. Study the subject you have secretly been curious about for twenty years.
You do not need to know where it will lead. You do not need to become an expert.
And you certainly do not need to be young.
Curiosity is enough reason to begin.
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