I love daydreaming about the future. I know its wishful thinking, but generally speaking I've determined one of a few life paths for myself. The first one has me becoming an Appeals Court justice, getting kidnapped, using Kung Fu that I somehow randomly learned to escape and then testifying at trial to put my captors in jail for ever and ever and ever. I realized what a law nerd I was when I started enjoying the trial portion of my daydreaming the most. The second one has me joining the CIA, becoming an expert spy, rescuing a random foreign dignitary from a MacGiver-esque evil plot, and then testifying at trial to put the supervillians in jail forever and ever and ever. Sensing a pattern?
The point is that even though those little fantasies are completely overblown, they are extreme representations of what I want from my life. I want to be the hero. I want to be the last line of defense against bad people who do bad things. I want to be right there, standing firm, keeping them away from the people they've victimized. More than that, I feel strongest and most powerful when I'm standing up for someone else.
Knowing that what I'm actively working towards is the same thing as what I genuinely want out of life, I decided to try my hand at figuring out what's actually going to happen. I know, I know, we can't know the future.
Or can we?
No. No we can't. I decided I would lay out the cards, read the book and see what I came up with just for fun though. I was surprised at how well many of the cards corresponded to the way I see myself. They showed that hard work, rather than luck, was my bread and butter. They warned me of gossip and rumors and called on me to make and keep close friendships.
In other words - the random card layout that was supposed to divine my future, really just gave me good advice. It struck me from going through the exercise of laying out cards and seeing what they said that people who do this for a living may not be the charlatans we make them out to be. At first as I was looking at the cards, I was surprised by how accurate they were. Yeah, I thought, I'm not lucky - I'm a hard worker and that's great by me. My goodness, gossip truly has been a terrible force in my life. The only way around such rumors has been my reliance on the friends I trust. There is only one explanation for this. I have psychic powers.
Ok. Maybe not.
In actuality, what I realized is that fortune-tellers are more like psychologists with weird methods. Ever seen that psychic show with John Edward? He gets mocked a lot for seeming to merely take his cues from audience members, rather than actually pulling details out of thin air.
Edward: I see a man... he's...
Audience member: Is he tall? My dad was tall.
Edward: He says he's your dad. He's so tall. Yes, he's here. He misses you.
Yeah, that's all kinds of not ok. However, there are people all around the world who claim to have had their future accurately predicted by a psychic somewhere. More than that, friends of mine and family have made comments that raise questions. What I mean to say is that I don't like the idea of shutting yourself off from any and all explorations of the wonders of the universe. We know there is more out there than what we see. To me, its an exercise of faith to explore things I hadn't thought of before and see where I end up. That's why I started wondering if there was anything behind the idea of laying out some cards and trying to see where I'm headed. Don't get me wrong though, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that the famous ones are probably 95% con-artist and 5% freaky hipster.
I don't like you.
I sat on my bed and laid out the cards in an order called the "Master Method". It was totes creative. The purpose, supposedly, was to look a little bit into each aspect of my future. There's a card position for love, one for work, social, admiration, negativity, family, hardship, success - everything. What I found was not that the cards somehow magically predicted my future. Rather, they came up and for each card, my mind made its own connections. Hard work is good? Oh yeah, that must be because I start my job in a week. Gossip is bad? Oh my, I better avoid telling people private things for a while. Friendships are good? I guess I should get out and socialize more.
Each card was less a picture of the future and more a single-sentence writing prompt with a blank page. I couldn't help but fill in the details. It struck me that this is probably how psychics operate. It was so much of a knee jerk reaction for me to try and fill in the story with things that made sense, that it makes me wonder if some psychics really do think they have seen something when really they're just insightful people. Interestingly enough, trying to lay out my own future made me feel somewhat less skeptical of professional psychics. Not that I think magic faeries are telling them what I'll have for breakfast tomorrow, but that perhaps many of them genuinely believe they are helping.
Trying my hand at fortune telling (get it? its a hilarious pun) piqued my curiosity about professional fortune tellers. Though I went to the numerologist - I did so to see what numbers played a part in the life I already have. She did give me some predictions, but that wasn't the primary focus. So, things have been added to my list. I'm going to get a professional tarot reading and a professional psychic reading just to see what all they say. I'm sure it will be interesting at the very least.
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