Who Stops When Others Keep Walking

The man walks past the table, stops a few strides beyond it, then turns around. “What the hell? Let me try this.”

Wayne drives a truck for a living now. Before that, he managed a team of three hundred people, a job he calls stressful in a slightly wistful yet angry tone that screams “good riddance.” He tells me he does a lot of thinking out on long hauls. When he has to come up with a question to put to a stranger and a deck of cards, he comes up with this doozy: “Am I a good person?” The question startles me, and he notices. “I told you I do a lot of thinking.”

I don’t know how I’d answer that with a deck of cards. I warn him that I am in no position to judge his life, but maybe the cards will give him more to think about. The Tower comes up reversed, and I interpret this as him surviving whatever wreck his last job was sending him toward. From that and the other cards, I suggest he needs to stop resisting the changes that will make him a better person. Wayne thanks me and strolls away. He leaves without a verdict on being good or bad but with a good conversation from someone taking his question seriously. My answers satisfy him.

Another reading down. How many others will stop by?

Who Actually Stops

I wrote about my cruise ship tarot card reading experiment in a previous post, but that was more about what I dealt with as the person putting myself out there. Now let’s look at the people who made the same leap of faith and sat down with me. Who would I attract?

My first hypothesis, as a woman in her seventies named Carol settled into the chair for my first reading, was that I’d mostly attract older women with time on their hands. That theory didn’t survive the hour, when middle-aged Wayne the truck driver plopped down next. The following day brought two crew members chewing over whether to walk away from their current jobs, and a run of women in their twenties and thirties working through questions about who they could trust. So there was no clean age or demographic pattern in the group. What these seekers had in common was timing. Each one had arrived at some turning point, and I caught them at the intersection of introspection and whimsy.

The pattern that did hold was who was traveling with someone else. Solo travelers, mostly but not only women, were the ones with a kind of what-the-heck-why-not openness to a stranger’s offer. Couples, without exception, kept walking together. So did people who clearly had somewhere else to be. One man looked at my sign, said “that’s scary,” and kept moving. Most people gave the same practiced “no, thank you” they’d been using all week to wave off the photo package and the raffle tickets and the drink-of-the-day pitch, and a free tarot reading got filed under the same heading. A woman named Jen was the exception that proved the rule: she broke off from a small group to come sit down, while the friends she’d left behind waved themselves off instead of following.

Figure Out What You Want, Then Go Get It

So what questions plague the minds of otherwise happy vacationers who can afford a cruise? One group of questions came from people who recognized they were at an inflection point.

The older Carol started off without a specific question, but she clearly had plenty on her mind. She still works, now at Home Depot, and she mentioned some health concerns in passing. What kept surfacing in our discussion, as prompted by both me and the cards she drew, was that she needed to choose her next goal and decide what was preventing her from achieving it—that would give her more direction. When Carol found out my readings benefited charities, she pressed twenty dollars into my hand over my protests. “It’s just going into the casino otherwise,” she said.

Two crew members, Stefan and Doran, came up together, excited to participate. Their enthusiasm was infectious. Both were stuck trying to figure out what’s next for them. Stefan is chasing an acting career and wanted advice before an upcoming audition; what came up (the Hierophant reversed) told him bluntly not to play it safe, to consider a less traditional approach. The reversed Two of Wands said something was actively in his way, and he agreed immediately; his contract to stay on the ship was stopping him from pursuing this dream, and he was considering breaking it. (Drama!) Doran, a magician by trade but currently working an admin job on the ship, wanted to know if he was on track toward anything real. He drew three major cards, making his reading easy but powerful: he knew intuitively what he has to do (the High Priestess), he knew what he wanted to achieve (the Star), but he’d been putting off doing anything about it for a while, afraid to commit (the Fool Reversed). He should consider trusting the Universe would provide when he takes that next step even if it felt foolhardy.

Though subtly different in their nuances, these answers were all effectively the same: you want to know what’s next? Well, figure out what you want, and go get it!

Same Crossroads, Different Directions

I’ve said before that questions rhyme. They begin to repeat… but between the variables of the situation and the different cards that come up, the answers can be pointed in opposite directions.

Two women, Jen and Beverly, came one after the other. Jen was very social; she left her group of friends to sit with me. However, both of them were auditing relationships… just from opposite ends.

Jen wanted to know which of her friends were actually worth her trust, and the reading pointed her toward the one who shows up with help (Queen of Pentacles) instead of one who’s always telling her what she should do (Queen of Wands, reversed). That resonated, so she asked a second question: whether her current relationship was genuine. However, that question went nowhere useful. She said she knew the cards couldn’t read another person’s feelings… then kept asking questions as if they could. Based on the Justice card in her tableau, my answer to her was, “You’ll get out of it what you put into it.”

Beverly had a clear question about growing a relationship she was serious about after being burned in a previous one. We were tickled when the first card to come up (the King of Wands) felt like her beau making an appearance. But the other cards suggested it wouldn’t be an automatic happy ending (Nine of Cups, reversed) — that she’d have to actively make some tough choices if she wanted to grow the relationship (Two of Swords). She seemed to take it as exactly the mix of permission and warning she’d wanted.

The last two readings happened on the final afternoon, after a ship’s inspector had already made me take my sign down and I was down to asking people directly instead of waiting to be noticed. A woman named Mo, tattooed and grinning, had had previous tarot readings before and loved them. Shortly after I finished with her, a quieter Nancy sat down, also familiar with tarot. Neither one arrived with a real question… but I kept pushing until I got a topic to frame the discussion. What unlocked both of them, oddly, was reminding them we’d never see each other again, that I was maybe the safest possible person to talk to about their hopes and fears. Both wanted to talk about retirement, but from different directions.

Mo had recently retired and was worried about having too much unstructured time ahead of her. Nancy, however, was nearing retirement but afraid to call it quits—she was a teacher worried she’d be bored without a classroom. She looked a little surprised herself at what came out for her question, as if saying it out loud was part of the answer. Once they had their questions, the cards told two people standing at the same threshold to do opposite things. The Seven of Cups told Mo to stop circling and daydreaming and pick something. The Ace of Pentacles suggested to Nancy that she’d recognize the right moment when it arrived.

It felt like such a privilege to be speaking to these people in honest, straightforward language as we turned over these questions and gave them more to reflect on.

So Meta: The Boat and Its Passengers, Both On Journeys

A cruise ship is regularly traveling between two ports. It may have a home but it’s always on the move, charting a path to its next destination. So too was everyone who sat down across from me that week: someone weighing a next goal, a career, a friendship, a whole second act, every one of them caught mid-crossing.

I still can’t tell you whether Wayne is a good person. I won’t ever know whether Stefan and Doran realize their career dreams, if Jen and Beverly find peace with their relationships, or if Carol, Mo, and Nancy find the right path to what’s next in their life. Each of them was in transition between two ports, on a boat full of people doing the same. I was fortunate to be able to play cruise director for them and offer entertainment and introspection.

With the confidence from those readings, I’ve booked two appearances in the month of September — a few hours at an open house at the Anam Cara Wellness Center in Burlington for the Lexington Food Pantry, and in my own booth at the North Reading Apple Festival for the North Reading Historical & Antiquarian Society.