I wrote this a few months ago, for another blog, but I find myself feeling the same sort of angst over this card again today...I am not feeling quite so despondent over it as I was then, but still - what the fuck, cards? What does this mean?
I'm going to spend the whole day looking over my shoulder and that's something I despise.
It's an easy card, right? We all know what it means. And in a reading for a stranger it's easy to interpret.
But when it's my card of the day I'm clueless. I look right and left, inside and out, searching for the ending thing. Will I get fired today? Probably not, that would be a Tower. Also, it would have shown up in my monthly reading, right? Will a friend or family member suddenly decide I'm not worth speaking to ever again? Doubtful. I always tell people, when I'm reading for them, that it's not a surprise.You know it's coming. It was on the schedule. It may not be pleasant, but you won't be taken off guard.
Perhaps that's part of the problem, though - I spend so much time running worst case scenarios in my brain that very little could actually surprise me, or seem unfounded. Catastrophe, inner or outer, always seems to be next on the list of things to do. I am spending my day wondering which bottom is going to fall through, which terrible thing I've always feared but knew would happen eventually is going to arrive on my doorstep.
How do I choose? How can I interpret this for myself in a sea of all the plausible nightmares? Something is being taken from me, but which thing? Is there more to the lesson than the trite and self-fulfilling call to love nothing, rely on no one, and avoid accepting anything from the larger world?
I can run through lists but nothing seems to fit. It could be my last shred of dignity, my last level teaspoon of self-respect. It could be all that is left of my capacity to try again the next day.
It could be the stubborn vestiges of idealism, finally washed clean, or my last few drops of give-a-damn-about-anything.
Part of the cognitive struggle, I suppose, is my inability to comprehend change as something that happens to me. It doesn't. The idea that I will be fundamentally changed by anything that might befall me today - short of physical death - is undermined by the simple fact that I seem to be incapable of fundamental change, no matter what my circumstances. (Now I wonder, is that it? Am I finally going to move beyond stagnation and launch into a new era of evolution and growth? I am making fun of myself, in case you can't tell.)
It could be that I'm giving up, in any one of a thousand ways. But I give up all the time. It's a daily experience. Ultimately, it has the same effect as Bill Murray's character's attempts at suicide in Groundhog Day - nothing actually changes.
At any rate, when I draw my daily card, I phrase it, "what should I focus on?" From that perspective, I suppose I'm doing a swell job. Nothing is permanent, everything is decaying around me, there is no point, blah, blah. Can I go back to sleep now?
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