how I learned to stop worrying and love The Tower

The Tower's meaning changes and grows with us.

The Tower: Change is coming, ready or not. 

Of course many of you will recognise the title as a play on the title of Stanley Kubrick's hilariously terrifying satire about war: Dr Strangelove or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb.

With lightning striking at its crumbling rooftop and people leaping from its windows like some medieval 911 scenario, The Tower has a very dodgy reputation as tarot cards go. It forms, along with Death and The Devil, what I call 'The Tripod of Terror'. These are cards that, as a reader, I'm really not that thrilled to see come out in a reading.

But not because they're terrible cards that necessarily mean death and destruction are coming your way. I just hate to see them because too many clients know only just enough about tarot to be scared of them.

I wish I had a dollar for every time I've turned a card to reveal The Tower only to hear my client make a sound as though they'd been punched in the stomach.

OOF!

I stop my very important work of laying out the cards, and look up to see them staring at The Tower as though it's a crime scene photo. I generally laugh then and say, 'Let me guess - you get your cards read a lot, but you don't read yourself?' And I'm generally right.

The surface reading of The Tower - in the little paper booklet that comes with every pack of tarot cards and contains one sentence on each of the 78 cards in your deck- will be something like:

CATASTROPHE! THE SKY IS FALLING! RUN! RUN AWAY! RUN FAR FAR AWAY.

But the reality is far more nuanced and hopeful than that.

Yes, The Tower does indeed usually tell us that it's time to let go of something. But it rarely means that you are going to lose everything without warning - which is how a lot of beginners see it. To me, the main lesson of The Tower is to grasp everything in your life lightly - because it all passes away.

When the time comes to let go of something - be it a job, a location or a relationship - be prepared to let it go. If you don't let go when the time comes to let go, The Universe has a nasty habit of reefing it out of your grasp.

"Give it up gracefully" says Life, "or I'll be forced to take it from you."

That is always the most painful option.

As the old hippie song goes - To everything there is a season, turn turn turn... If you want to see some crazy go-go dancers and hear some of those pretty harmonies from the 1960s, take a moment to listen to The Byrds tweeting out some timeless wisdom. To everything, there is a season...

My own favourite story of The Tower and how it can play out in real life happened like this:

Many years ago, before I'd gotten better acquainted with The Tower, when I was still afraid of that bolt of lightening that would come out of nowhere and lay waste to my life, I laid out some cards regarding a crucial creative grant I'd applied for. My career would be set back by years by failure in this matter!

BAM! Out came The Tower along with several other cards that would normally refer to my creative endeavours.

Dammit. Dammit dammit dammit. I wasn't getting the grant. Obviously. I was so bummed. I felt like I'd already heard the bad news and right away, I began the work of getting over it.

The next day, I had a practice session with my music partners, Dougy and Laurence. I own a beautiful rare old Maton classical guitar, considered one of the best guitars ever made in Australia. I've had it since I was 16 years old when I swapped it for my Yamaha semi-acoustic. Believe me, I got the best side of that deal.

I loved that guitar and couldn't imagine playing anything else. There were problems though, and I'd been thinking of getting another guitar for a while. Since I'd been jamming with Laurence and Dougy, my gentle nylon string was overwhelmed by the sound of their pushy steel strings.

But I held off. I couldn't let go of my Maton.

You know what's coming, don't you?

There I was, standing with my beloved guitar across my belly, slung on its strap around my shoulder. As we talked about what to play next, I rested my crossed arms atop the body, not a care in the world.

Until the guitar strap broke. With the weight of my arms on top of her pushing towards the ground, I didn't have a hope of saving her. She smashed to the floor, totally unplayable. I was inconsolable. That guitar was like my third child.

But we had a gig to play in 2 days time. I didn't have time to grieve her. I had to buy a new guitar.

So, guess what? I loved my new guitar. I should have bought it earlier so that Ms Maton didn't need to be sacrificed to my inability to let go of the old. My musical ability progressed out of sight with an updated tool of trade.

I was able to find someone to patch my first love up. She's playable. I love her still and play her often - but she'll never be the same.

This was vintage Tower action. Like all cards, there are nuances and different interpretations depending on the issue under discussion, but at base, The Tower teaches us to let go and be ready for anything. It can foretell a broken guitar or a car accident - but it can also foretell the love of your life or a lottery win, depending on the cards surrounding it.

Change is coming whether you like it or not. Be flexible.

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manifesting... it's really just expecting the best

YES!

That's exactly what I mean to tell you.

It's called visualisation, or more fashionably 'manifestation' and it's a principle which says that what we concentrate on comes to us.

It's not exactly magic. But it can seem that way. What you focus your will upon will come to pass in your life. Not always in the way you expected, but your thoughts will be reflected in your life for better or worse.

If you focus your mind on health and exercise, you are very likely to follow those thoughts with action and you will be a healthy person. If you focus on wealth, you are likely to take the kinds of action needed to make money. If you focus on love, you will exude love which attracts others and you are likely to live a life filled with doting lovers, friends and family.

Conversely of course, if you focus on negative thoughts, you are going to attract negative experiences.

For instance, fear. If you're a very fearful person, you'll find yourself stumbling through life, hesitating at the very times when you should take a gamble and therefore missing opportunities. In relationships, you'll find yourself expecting the worst of the world and suspecting the worst of your partner - which will drive them away. This is what's called self fulfilling prophecy and it's closely related to visualisation. From there, it's but a short leap to manifestation.

And YES! What I'm saying there is you can manifest negatively as well as positively.

When you expect the worst, calamity gravitates towards you like a homing pigeon. If you expect the best, good luck will also find its way to you.

This is not to say that when terrible things happen, it means you've brought it on yourself by negative thinking. Terrible things come to us all regardless of how we think about life. But I do believe that some of these bad things are avoidable in the first place, certain others we can make better with a positive attitude and the worst of these terrible things which are a natural part of the human condition - failure, loss, grief - can be processed and recovered from more quickly and completely when we are in charge of our own minds.


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making the most of your misery...

I think one of the places people of my generation have failed in bringing up our kids is that we so badly wanted them to be happy - have this! watch this! go here! distract yourself with this fun thing! - that many of us didn't teach them that unhappiness is a normal part of life. 

In fact, it's a crucial part of life. 

These are some of the things I'd say to our young now. These are some of the things I'd have made clearer to my own kids if I had it to do over. 

You will never escape times of unhappiness. We never taught you how to just sit with the feeling of being unhappy. We never taught you that being unhappy with your lot isn't the worst thing  that can happen to you.

We also didn't teach you really effective ways out of your angst. I'm not saying we should go back to the old days, the tough old days where men were men and women ate their young - modern psychology has identified a lot of issues that make humans unhappy and that's a good start. Now we need to start making sure that everyone gets some grounding in how to live with and find their way through, the part of the human condition called misery.

1) Write things down. If you're unhappy with your life as it is, organise it via the written word.

a) what's wrong with my life 

b) what can I do to make it better 

c) what do I need to take that action and most important of all 

d) TAKE THE ACTION.

2) Get out of your own head. Think of others. Do something for someone you love for no reason whatsoever. Do something useful for someone you don't even know for no reason. Do this more than once. Make a weekly habit of it. All of our unhappiness exists within the 2 square foot of space that our body occupies. Move out of that 2 square foot regularly and put yourself into someone else's - it makes you bigger. 

3) Get help to take care of the things in life that need to be taken care of. One of the greatest sources of anxiety is the feeling there are a million things you should be doing, that it will be utterly disasterous if they don't get done and you don't even know where to start. Accountants, lawyers, house cleaners - god bless them, every one, for doing for us the things that make us crazy. 

4) Learn to meditate. You will hear it over and over through life. Learn to meditate. It stills the grasshopper human mind and gives times of great peace and insight.

5) Dwell on the positive as much as you can. For most of us, there are a dozen positive things happen in our day for every negative one - but the human mind is rigged to look out for danger and so it latches on to every little negative occurrence and lets them crowd out the positive. I don't mean you should ignore the negative - but you should certainly strive consciously to give the positive equal weight in your life. Your family, the roof over your head, your health, books to read, gorgeous nature to moon over - there is so much to be happy for in even the very worst day.

6) Understand that whatever is happening for you now, it will pass. None of it is the end of the world. Understand really truly deeply that we are all miserable sometimes.

Life is good for a while and then it's crap and then it's really really good for a long while and then it's catastrophic suddenly and then later it's good again and ... so on and so forth to the end, where you look back and you really only remember the love and adventure  you shared with the people you met up with.

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