Happy New Year. 2018 is here, after another year that went by in a blur. I can’t believe 2017 went so fast.

Last year I put a lot into many things, especially tarot. I spent the whole year studying the cards: meanings, techniques, spreads, even techniques that connect numbers, elements and astrology. It made me feel that tarot has so much to study that sometimes I could hardly tell which part connected to which, or once I’d finished studying something, I didn’t know what I needed to learn next.

But after studying so much, an old question I’d asked myself long ago came back: which method works best, which one is the most accurate? When I tried using what I’d studied and stuck strictly to the rules, the results weren’t very good. Sometimes it made me so attached to the rules that I couldn’t read the cards at all. So do these extra methods I’ve studied really work?

Then I thought back to my first days of reading the cards, the days when I had no rules at all, and yet my readings flowed without getting stuck. Maybe it’s better not to hold on to anything?

If I compare myself to the 22 Major Arcana cards, I think right now I’m at The World. I’ve hit a dead end, boxed in by a frame. I know there are so many beautiful, tempting techniques all around me, but how do I use them without letting them squeeze me so tight that they get in the way of my reading?

Looking at the card and thinking further, I think I read somewhere that The World is the end of what we’re doing. It isn’t really an end. It’s a destination, ready for the start of another path to join on so we can keep walking. Like the last day of the year: it doesn’t end and make time disappear. It’s a day ready for the first day of the next year to join on, so we can carry on with our lives.

Maybe last year was the end of studying all those techniques, so that this year I can go back to being The Fool. Start my own way, without overthinking, without being strict, and let intuition pull those techniques out on its own.

All right. Let’s try again. Let’s step out of The World’s beautiful frame and travel like The Fool again.

With nothing at all…