Does It Have to Be This Hard?

When something comes easily, do you trust it? Or do you immediately start looking for the catch?

I’ve been thinking about this since Venus turned retrograde in Scorpio on October 3. We can become so accustomed to working through difficulty that something straightforward starts to feel suspicious. Maybe even a little boring.

Scorpio is associated with depth, intensity and a willingness to face things other people would rather avoid. It wants to understand what’s happening underneath the explanation everyone has agreed to accept.

But could that willingness to go through difficulty become an attachment to it? Could we start believing that something has to hurt before we get to have the win?

Venus speaks to what we desire, enjoy and value. It also describes attraction, including what draws us to invest our time, money and attention in something.

A Venus retrograde gives us an opportunity to revisit those preferences. Something you wanted badly a few years ago might still be absorbing your energy even though your interest in it has changed. Stopping would mean admitting how much you’ve given to something you no longer want.

With this retrograde beginning in Scorpio, intensity is part of the conversation. When something consumes us, it can feel enormously significant. We imagine how satisfying it will be when we finally get through the difficult part, without necessarily separating the satisfaction of having what we wanted from the relief of finally winning the struggle.

You’ve spent months trying to make an offer sell. You’ve rewritten it, lowered the price, raised the price and explained it every way you can think of. Meanwhile, clients keep asking for something you find relatively easy to deliver. You almost dismiss it. Surely that can’t be the thing you build your business around. Where’s the challenge?

The work people already want from you gets less attention than the offer you’re determined to make succeed. Its ease almost seems to count against it.

Or you’re pursuing a potential client who remains just out of reach. You keep adjusting the proposal and trying to find the thing that will finally convince them. Landing that client starts to feel like proof of your ability.

Would you actually enjoy working with them? Have you given that question as much attention as how to win them over?

We can spend so much time figuring out how to get what we want that we barely examine why we want it, or whether we still do. Someone who says yes without making us work so hard for it might receive considerably less of our attention.

At what point does overcoming difficulty become so compelling that we lose interest in what’s available without it?

Building a business takes effort. A worthwhile project can stretch you and require more patience than you expected. Difficulty alone, though, tells us very little about whether something deserves our continued investment.

Mercury also turns retrograde in Scorpio on October 24, just before Venus returns to Libra. We can use that period to revisit the explanations we keep offering ourselves. “I’ve come too far to stop” may have become a familiar response whenever we consider changing direction. At some point, it deserves another look.

The house occupied by Scorpio in your birth chart gives you an area of life in which to explore these questions. In the sixth house, you might examine the way you work and what you expect your days to demand of you. In the seventh, your clients and partnerships. In the tenth, the ambitions you’re pursuing and what achieving them has come to represent.

You can find Scorpio in your chart using my free birth chart generator. You’ll need your birth date, time, and place. Then open the houses-in-business wheel and click that house to explore its business themes.

What’s already available to you that you haven’t taken seriously because it hasn’t been hard enough to get?

First published in Cristina Dolores Astrology, my newsletter for entrepreneurs.