The smartest person in the room

The thing about Aquarians and Uranian energy is that the winner of the day will always be the smartest person in the room. Fire people are impressed by feats of strength (literally: what can you bench?). Water people are impressed by depth of emotion. Earth is impressed by all your stuff and how old it is (and all your MONEY). Air, and specifically Aquarius, cares about who can run circles around whom in an intellectual argument.

In a former life, I was surrounded by this. Everywhere I went: an argument, a debate, a book you had to read, a YouTube lecture you had to watch. You one-upped people by having "seen it already" or by explaining the nuances of whatever argument you were discussing more accurately. Ever been to a party where there are 5 smartest people in the room who don't agree with each other? (At some point you'd really need to use the word "party" loosely.) Eventually I went to therapy and learned about the concept of intellectualization, in which people explain their feelings in a rational way instead of actually feeling them, which explained most of my life. Then I continued intellectualizing for about 5 more years after that, still thinking I was feeling things. I wrote my poor friends loooooong emails about my feelings and why they made sense. It was cute in a sad way.

One time, I loved someone who repeatedly logic-ed his way out of feelings and kept breaking up with me after "thinking about it a lot" (never out loud or in an open discourse, and that thinking involved a list of ideals I was falling short of, which, 😢), and after enduring those humiliations, I started avoiding Aquarian/Uranian/air people because I was convinced that none of them actually had souls (not literally, but if you've been around a few I bet you know what I mean). Following my determination to avoid the Smarts, I once went out on a date with a guy who talked about his intelligence as though it was an appendage ("my intelligence") and I had to struggle to keep a straight face. (Smart people never have to tell you they're smart: that's probably the 7th rule of Smart Club.)

Years passed. I kept failing to avoid the geniuses. One day, through work, I met someone who could NOT stop talking (to be clear, this one was just an acquaintance). "Intellectualizer." Indeed. Incessant talking was the first clue but the second clue was he felt very familiar to me. The more I got to know him, the more I learned that he liked to dominate conversations with nervous talking to make sure you *understood* his point, and if you did not, he would get scrap paper and draw it for you. Smartest person in the room, but here's the thing, guys: you can't be smart at everything. There's still human error and human frailty and the fact that no matter how smart you may think your arguments are, you can't convince everyone that you are right all the time through sheer force of will or incessant talking. And! The "smart" values can't be global. I worked in academia for (way too long) and I encountered so many geniuses in their field who struggled with complicated light switches, copiers, and organizing information/their inbox/their kitchen cabinets. It's nice to be smart but these gifts take up a lot of space and skew the balance on other areas of life. Strength in one area means weakness in others. No one has it all.

The intellectualizer in the paragraph above called me yesterday to tell me about an error I didn't know I was making. He had no other agenda and was super-friendly and happy to talk to me and thought I would be very happy to know about a mistake I hadn't fixed yet.

One of my favorite movies is Harvey (1950): Jimmy Stewart's character, Elwood P. Dowd, hangs out in bars and with people you would deem "losers" and may or may not have an invisible friend (the titular 'Harvey'). He says the following: "Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, 'In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.' Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant."  Though I am not reliably smart or pleasant, I now share Elwood's view of the world, for reasons you might imagine more fully if you watch the movie and/or read the following.

Here's the easiest way to alienate the smartest people in the room: be an astrologer or a working psychic or both (hi!). There are definitely some astrologer geniuses, don't get me wrong (I can tell you which of their books to read), but an air argument regarding why astrology is dumb is something like "you can't possibly be telling me the alignment of the planets at the moment of my birth has some bearing on how I live my life." In my former life, I probably said something similar to that on a monthly basis. And as for psychic stuff, I mean, don't even start. You can't show how it works and anyone who's tried to demonstrate psychic ability in a laboratory setting hasn't done well, so since we can't prove it, it's BS. Right? Right? I can think of other pointless ways to waste my time, but arguing over this stuff is a pretty good one. I still have friends who take pains to tell me that they don't believe what I'm saying is real, but they love me anyway!

So what does one do when you have information for a smartest person in the room that comes from an unseen source but might heal a few of their sore spots? Someone you care about but who looks down on you because intuitive gifts are very 'not-smart?' Riddle me that, because I still haven't figured out the graceful navigation of this one. It's not "smart" to believe in things you can't see, but it's also not smart to live a life of principles-only, because trust me when I say that your principles will not keep your warm at night, they will not love you back, and your friends who live their lives on principles will vanish if you deviate from your shared values. Smart only gets you so far, so you have to be a human, too. (Or a really weird human, in my case.)

With Pluto in Aquarius and Uranus entering Gemini this year for a little bit (in good aspect to each other), there's going to be a crop of really smart babies born whose lives are going to have some of the themes discussed here, so if you run into one, nurture their smartness but encourage them to pursue things just for the fun of it so they don't wind up like some of my old friends. Smart only gets you so far, and your principles can't be too lofty. We'll all be taking a crash course in that for the next few years, but heavy air people are signed up for that lesson for a lifetime and they can't just audit it. (My jokes can’t all be good.)