When a friend asks to do my star chart, I oblidge then promptly forget what the results say. I find all horoscopes of the newspaper variety nearly useless, except for the excellent Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology, which always prompts me to think a little about where I am and where I want to go. I never read it to actually find out what my future holds.

But there is one source I return to day after day for inspiration – Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies.

Originally published as a deck of cards in 1975, the ruminative epigrams have undergone 5 new editions and are now available on the web and as an iPhone application.

From the official (?) website:

The deck itself had its origins in the discovery by Brian Eno that both he and his friend Peter Schmidt (a British painter whose works grace the cover of “Evening Star” and whose watercolours decorated the back LP cover of Eno’s “Before and After Science” and also appeared as full-size prints in a small number of the original releases) tended to keep a set of basic working principles which guided them through the kinds of moments of pressure – either working through a heavy painting session or watching the clock tick while you’re running up a big buck studio bill. Both Schmidt and Eno realized that the pressures of time tended to steer them away from the ways of thinking they found most productive when the pressure was off. The Strategies were, then, a way to remind themselves of those habits of thinking – to jog the mind.

Brian Eno had this to say by way of explanation:

The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation – particularly in studios – tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you’re in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that’s going to yield the best results Of course, that often isn’t the case – it’s just the most obvious and – apparently – reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, “Don’t forget that you could adopt *this* attitude,” or “Don’t forget you could adopt *that* attitude.”

I use the iPhone app as a kind of reverse horoscope. Each morning I fire up the app and let it randomly pick a card. Today’s, for example, says, “Disciplined self-indulgence.” So today I will attempt to understand what exactly that can mean and then use it in my writing and coping with the day.