My daily Gemini Astro-Scroll arrived as a text message, it was 6 a.m. and I’d already inadvertently stomped on my dog Abra’s fresh scat in my new slippers. I was not expecting much of a day:

“Hi dude and dudettes crap day ahead for Geminis I would try to put a positive spin on it but due to overwhelming celestial factors it’s utterly impossible for you to have anything but a bleak miserable day. You know the saying “expect the best but plan for the worst” today I would say “expect the worst and plan for the worst” sorry but don’t be blaming me these scrolls are all done by AI and have proven to be 100% accurate best outlook: tomorrow may be marginally better.”

I had a 2 dollar coin in my pocket and had to find 20 dollars to pay for my furniture rental today. I had already received a repossession and demand notice and today was the deadline.

That was the pressing dilemma of the day. I had been reading Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now which I found discarded on my last dumpster dive¹ (see note) at the back ofHappy Life Health Food Market and kept this quote:

“As soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve, and life begins to flow with joy and ease. When you act out the present-moment awareness, whatever you do becomes imbued with a sense of quality, care, and love — even the most simple action.”

I thought, great, I would live this quote today, under even these difficult circumstances and make the best of it and see if this mental attitude and action, could overcome the pessimistic, deterministic factors forecast by the morning Astro-Scroll.

I headed out in the old Saab with a surrendered attitude: stay in the present and the universe will provide. I turned on my fuel to distance app on my phone, which overrode the old Saab technology and gave an incredibly accurate forecast to the meter, of fuel distance.

You have 5.2 Kilometers of fuel left

Well, there it was, the hard facts, 2 dollars in my pocket and a 20 dollar debt to be paid otherwise my rental furniture (including my cloud bed) would be gone by the morning.

I pulled into a garage to spend the 2 dollars on fuel. Incredibly the last customer had neglected to hang up the nozzle properly and I was ecstatic to see a few leftover drops drip into the tank. The app informed me:

You added 12 meters of fuel.

I noticed a wallet sitting on the petrol bowser as well, and thought “great, an opportunity to generate some good karma” and was about to take the wallet into the garage to report it.

An elderly man spied me:

Thanks for finding that, here is a reward for being anhonest Johnny.

He pulled out a twenty dollar note and passed it to me ²(see note).

Un-freaking-believable, don’t you think?

Tears welled up in my eyes. I was speechless.

I paid my bill at the rental company and jumped into the Saab and headed home, I cried out, to no one in particular:

You see that, stars? You are powerless before the potential of mind. Free Will trumps the deterministic power of the heavens!

As if I had challenged Zeus himself, and he personally responded, the fuel to distance app piped up:

“You have 500 meters left before catastrophic engine failure.”

I calculated the distance to home: 490 meters — Bonus!

Note[1] Freegans who use the Happy Life Health Food Market dumpster please leave enough of the out-of-date Ben’s High Nutrient Cliff Bars for others to share, thanks.

Note[2] I found out later it wasn’t his wallet and it had around $500 in it, but that’s a side issue.

Photo by Daniel Cheung on Unsplash