“These are the days you wish your bed was already made”
– from Manic Monday by The Bangles

“I got stones in my passway
And my road seem dark as night”
– from Stones in My Passway by Robert Johnson

AUTHOR’S NOTE: “Discouraging daily draw,” that is. Although I admit to seldom doing them unless a major event is on the horizon, many people perform a single-card daily pull, whether as an unstructured card-by-card learning experience or just to obtain a heads-up about the coming day. Because these exercises are entirely self-contained, receiving a “bad” card can suggest a looming hardship with no obvious way out of the dilemma.

My general advice in these cases is to “take a deep breath, back up two steps and don’t get rattled.” There is no way that a single card can show in detail how a matter is likely to play out over the next 24 hours because it offers no developmental trajectory. At most it can signal a challenging “tone” or theme for the period that should be taken under advisement without immediately pushing the panic button. While I realize that tarot is often consulted to anticipate just such random drama, decades of practice have shown that the anxiety is rarely justified. Unless we are at a singularly volatile juncture in life, conditions aren’t likely to change catastrophically on a day-to-day basis, so I may even remove the Major Arcana cards from the deck when doing these readings to more accurately reflect mundane reality. (Do we really need the Tower when the worst that might happen is stumbling while bringing in the groceries?)

But this is an artificial workaround when the trump cards can serve to describe the archetypal backdrop or environmental circumstances (perhaps an unrecognized “trip hazard?”) behind more specific events conveyed by the lesser cards, so it’s best to leave them in. A much more useful solution is to expand the pull to three cards that will offer a “moving target” that can change for the better (but also for the worse) as the day unfolds. In my opinion, courting the risk of a downturn is preferable to starting and ending with no clear success path, so a little movement in the situation should be welcomed as something we can at least try to manipulate to our benefit. (From a learning perspective, it also teaches card interaction.)

If we as tarot readers are to take our mission of client empowerment seriously, we should always be looking for a “way out” when the cards pulled seem to offer no encouragement. It’s the “glass-half-full” scenario in which we should seek insights about how it might be “topped off.” (By the way, I’m not pushing the use of “clarifier” cards since I very rarely use them; just rev up your creative imagination.) There is little to be gained by applying the “half-empty” assumption beyond prompting the need for cautious preparation. While discretion is not necessarily unwarranted when the stakes are high and opportunities to leverage any advantage appear to be nil, there is almost always a more proactive answer (short of wanting to rationalize our way out of what seems to be inevitable) that will guide the seeker toward the most productive escape route.

Even if it’s only “Keep your head down and your eyes on the ground, watching for hazardous stones as you go. Although the temptation is there, resist the urge to simply crawl back in bed and wait for a better day.”