A Different Thread

When thinking runs out of road

On using tarot as a reflective tool, and why it has nothing to do with predicting the future

I should say this at the outset: I don’t think the cards know anything I don’t.

I’m not reading my future in them. I’m not asking them to make decisions for me. And I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything. What I do believe in is thinking. And I’ve learned, over a long time, that thinking needs a door.

Tarot is one of mine.

For me it’s a ritual first of all, and that matters more than people expect.

I handle the cards in a particular way. I talk to them, which sounds stranger than it is. The shuffling, the deliberate unhurried gestures, the small ceremony of it: all of it does something. It slows me down. It marks a shift from the rushing part of the day into something quieter and more receptive.

I don’t do this daily. It’s a weekly or monthly practice, sometimes less, sometimes called for by a particular moment rather than the calendar. It happens when it happens.

When it does, I sit with whatever comes up and I wonder. Not what does this mean? but where does this fit? Which corner of my life or work is this speaking to? Where might I be looking at something too directly, when a different angle might reveal something I’ve been missing?

Sometimes a card lands and something shifts immediately. Sometimes I turn one over and feel nothing in particular, and I simply set it aside. I don’t force it. If there’s no connection, there’s no connection.

That permission to not find meaning is, I think, what makes the whole thing work.

I think a lot about how we think. About the conditions that make genuine reflection possible, not the performed kind, not the kind that produces a neat deliverable, but the kind that quietly shifts something. The kind that means you see a situation differently the following morning without quite knowing why.

Tarot is one of my tools for that. Long walks are another. Strong coffee. A conversation with someone who asks better questions than they offer answers.

The common thread is that none of them tell me what to think. They simply make a space where thinking can happen differently.

The cards I pulled for May were The Hanged Man, the Four of Wands, and the Nine of Wands. I wrote about those in a recent newsletter, sitting with each one and noticing where it landed. Not looking for predictions. Just looking for questions I hadn’t thought to ask myself.

If you’re curious about that kind of reflection, you can read it here. (link to newsletter piece)

I’m beginning to weave this way of thinking into the work I do with others, particularly when someone has run out of road on their usual approach and needs an unexpected thread to pull.

Not as a reading. Not as anything that requires belief in anything beyond the value of slowing down and paying attention. Just as a way of introducing something visual and unexpected into the thinking, something the logical linear mind can’t immediately categorise or defend against.

In that small gap of not-knowing, something else sometimes gets a chance to emerge.

That feels worth paying attention to.

With kindness and coffee, Sharon