Start your day with a Tarot reading, instead of looking at your phone. Your phone contains all the noise of human ignorance and misery, expressed as righteous indignation. Tarot cards contain the wisdom of centuries and take the ego out of everything. They rely on pure chance.
This morning, I have drawn the Star, the Empress and Judgement. Let’s say light or enlightenment; motherhood and feminine earthly power; and, the ultimate reckoning: ourselves.
It’s not about predicting the future, but it is about what my day might hold, in the sense that it gives me a perspective on the events that might unfold. It’s a reminder that nothing that happens will be unique to me or unprecedented. It’s also a reminder that I am part of the entire narrative of human existence, from the time when we were first able to express ideas in ways other than sound or gesture.
If you’re presented with a problem, whether it’s interesting or annoying, you can run it through the filter of today’s cards.
Let’s say you’ve got a job to do and you haven’t got the information you need. The people you need to clarify it are not around.
The habitual human response – the kind of response you see in comment threads and posted on platforms like Instagram and X – might be to get angry or hurt. “They’ve done it AGAIN, why doesn’t someone do something to stop this happening?” Or, “I can’t do this, what if I get into trouble for failing to do the job? Am I missing something, is it my fault?”
If you reflect on the cards and use them to filter your response to the problem, you might follow a different process.
For example, there’s a lot of light and power in these three cards. There’s something about judgement, which might mean that you’re worried about what others will think of you. Or, it might mean that you can trust your own judgement.
There’s also a lot of feminine energy, and a lot about birth (on some cards the Empress is pregnant and some say the Judgement card is about awakening or rebirth). Feminine energy is often about flow and fluidity, as well as compassion. On the Star card, the woman is pouring water into what could be a flowing stream.
With this guidance, your response to the problem might be to look at the job again and see what you can take from what you have, bearing in mind that you do have the power to bring your own judgement to solving the problem. You can move your response from, “This is wrong, I can’t do this,” to “My colleagues have done their best to help me. What can I do with what I have, drawing on my own experience and talent?”
In other words, you take the ego out of the issue and look at it objectively. You find your own power, instead of giving it away and feeling undermined by the situation.
Reading social media posts, or watching the news, you might think that everything is broken and the world is in a bad place. It’s true that there are some terrible things going on, but the Tarot reminds us that there always have been. We do not need to live our lives feeling overwhelmed and powerless.
Instead, we can recognise that we are the inheritors of a timeless wisdom and compassion, one that can guide us and that we can share with everyone around us.
Maybe we can’t change the world, but we can make our part of it a nicer place to be.