December 9

Who you are

You learn by going. Books get you to the edge of a subject and then you need to be in the room, on the site, in the actual country, talking to somebody who does it daily. Your friends notice that you come back from holidays with a method rather than photographs, and that you try it on your own life within a week.

You ask questions most adults have trained themselves out of asking. Why is it done this way. Who decided. What happens if we stop. You are not being difficult, you genuinely do not know, and your willingness to look uninformed in front of experts is the reason you learn faster than people who are protecting a reputation.

Your gifts

• Firsthand. You go and see for yourself rather than repeating what you were told.
• Import and adapt. You bring back a way of doing things and make it work somewhere new.
• No fear of looking new. You ask the beginner question in a room of experts and get the real answer.

Your shadow

Unsupervised, learning becomes a way of never finishing. There is always another course, another country, another version of yourself available if you go somewhere else first, and starting is far more pleasant than the year three slog. People around you get used to being left mid project. You call it curiosity. Some of it is a dislike of being ordinary at something.

Your soul work

The soul work is to stay past the interesting part. Choose one thing and remain with it through the stretch where you are no longer improving visibly and nobody is impressed. Depth is the one experience travel cannot give you, and it is only available to people who stop moving long enough to get bored.

Days you get along with

Your sign

The ninth sign fires its arrow at the horizon and follows it. Sagittarius carries the gift of faith in the distance, and the lesson of being here.

Someone else

Look up another birthday

Check a friend's day, or your partner's, and send it to them.