Perched and Waiting

It’s 8am on our cruise ship and the deck is nearly empty.  A few other early birds have finished breakfast and are wandering around looking for some morning entertainment. But me? I’ve got a small table cover down, tarot cards spread out, a notebook open to a blank page, and a previously printed page reading FREE TAROT READINGS in a plexiglass sign holder. 

My wife is asleep back in our cabin. I have exactly nothing else to do for the next hour except sit here and see if anyone stops.

Will anyone stop?

I smile nervously as people walk by, ignoring me.  A few glance over long enough to read the sign, but then shuffle onward trying not to make eye contact. No doubt they thought I was selling them something on a ship full of staff constantly pitching upsells. This is crazy, my inner monologue muses. The vibe isn’t right for this. What was I thinking? I consider leaving, but I’m determined to complete the experiment and get a few readings with random strangers.

Why is this so mentally hard to do?

Getting My At-Bats

This trip was not about tarot readings – it was about an early anniversary celebration and marking the transition to having both kids in college. But going into this trip, I also got the notion that setting up to do free tarot readings at a table might be fun – more specifically, that it might give the same high that I experienced from my last set of group readings.  I want to meet more strangers and hear their stories.  I want more reps so that reading tarot feels less like a high-wire performance and more like… well, like a language I speak fluently. From giving readings at the church fundraiser, I know live, semi-public readings can still surface those interesting, surprisingly in-depth conversations. A cruise ship would be a similar setting, minus the fundraiser and with 50x the people: literally a captive audience of a few thousand strangers with nowhere in particular to be.

In other words, it became a chance for more time in the batting cages. After all, a hitter doesn’t get better by thinking about hitting. Batters get better by standing in the box against live pitching, over and over, until their hands know what to do before their brains have finished deciding. More Tarot at-bats would level up my reading skills. Sitting at a table on a big boat, waving strangers over, was about as close as I could get to a batting cage for talking to people about their lives.

The Cost of Rejection Is Zero… Right?

As I resisted a fight, flight, or freeze instinct, I kept reminding myself that the actual cost of this experiment was close to zero. Few people on this boat knew me. If every person who walked by kept walking, I’d have spent an hour of vacation people-watching. There was no real rejection possible here, because there’s no relationship to damage. 

Decades ago I watched a college friend, Charlie, spend a warm autumn evening wandering around Harvard Square asking cute diners at outdoor tables if they wanted to join him for a game of strip poker. Those who know Charlie know he is anything but “conventional,” and yet it was hard to poke holes in his logic. He fully expected everyone to say “no.” He reasoned that each proposition only cost him potential embarrassment and repeated blows to his ego. Every “no” was more practice making challenging requests under pressure and getting comfortable with rejection. (Plus, he pointed out, there was always that small chance someone said yes, in which case he’d probably had an interesting night.) While his choice of exercise was, um, questionable at best (hey, it was the 90s), he came out of that evening less afraid to approach strangers and strike up a conversation, a skill that despite my extroversion I still sometimes struggle with.

I thought about Charlie a few times while I waited on that boat deck, because I was running a version of the same experiment.  Now admittedly, my offer was much less scandalous, although tarot does carry its own stigma. If I’d put up a sign saying “free high-fives,” I’d have plenty of takers. If I’d set up a table offering free back rubs, someone would have called security. Tarot readings sit somewhere uncomfortably in between those extremes: technically harmless, but unusual enough that offering it to a stranger costs you something socially every time, in a way that offering a compliment or a mint never would. I hadn’t fully accounted for that “social tax” going into the experiment. Still, I wasn’t really afraid of “no” – the cost was “oh no, they kept walking.” And I wasn’t afraid of getting in trouble.  So… what the heck was I afraid of? I guess I was afraid of… being a nuisance to others on the cruise? 

I drew a card to see what was going on.  The Devil came up, which is a card about feeling mentally trapped and dealing with imposter syndrome. Aha. That’s what I was afraid of… that somehow this would prove I’m not actually any good at this. The cost of rejection is my own self-confidence. Fortunately, I’ve learned how to fight imposter syndrome elsewhere, so I feel well-equipped to battle it here as well.  And these readings are one way to do so.

Then the Sign Comes Down

It turns out I did get to do a reading, and another the next day – in total I had 8 people stop by across four one-hour morning sessions across two locations.  The first morning, a woman sat down and drew three cards about how to make the most of her next chapter in life. When I mentioned partway through that my readings support charities, she pulled a $20 bill out of her bag after I’d finished the spread. I hadn’t asked, and I told her it was unnecessary, but she insisted. That wonderful interaction did more to shut up the voice telling me this was a stupid thing to be doing on vacation than any amount of psyching myself up beforehand had managed.

I’d like to tell you the nerves went away completely, but they didn’t. I will say, though: every session got a little easier to start, even if I never made it to “easy.”  It’s just like how a batter is still on edge when he faces live pitching. I wasn’t expecting to wake up completely fearless one day.  I still get butterflies before I get up in front of people on stage or for a presentation. But I’ve become accustomed to that feeling, and I can feed off of it.

Towards the end of the trip, a uniformed ship’s inspector stopped by the table and explained that my little sign had to come down.  She was entirely pleasant about it, and she told me I could keep giving readings. I just couldn’t put up a sign and look like I was “official.” 

That sounds like no big deal, but I realized it was a big one.  A sign lets you be found. Without one, on the last morning at sea, I had to actually say the words out loud to strangers walking past: “hey, want a free tarot reading?” I couldn’t use the sign as a crutch anymore, sitting and waiting to be chosen. It moved me from advertising to soliciting… and the second is definitely harder. I found myself being more deliberate about who I asked, reading body language for anyone who looked like they had a spare ten minutes and an open mind, because I only had so many tries in me before the awkwardness of asking started to outweigh the awkwardness of not.

Risk-Takers Seek Risk-Takers

Of course, I’m not the only one taking a risk. What kind of people are willing to accept a free tarot reading with a stranger on a cruise ship?

That other side of the equation will be the subject of my next post.