The Questions I’m Asked

The questions people ask are really, really interesting… very often not so much the question itself, but for what it reveals about the client, or about where it leads. Fascinating stuff, this collaborative process of reading the cards.

“Will I get the job?” I understand why people ask me to reveal their future to them. I don’t do it, but I understand the question. They want an end to the uncertainty, they want to be able to relax into whatever’s going to happen, and stop worrying about it! Of course, very often they want a specific answer, so it could be that the answer they received would only increase their anxiety, anyway. But still, it’s easy to see why you’d want an answer to that question, sooner than HR finally gets back to you … or doesn’t.

“Am I pregnant?”  Um … you know there are such things as pregnancy tests, right? Why on earth are you consulting a stranger, very often hundreds of kilometres away, when the answer is right down the street,  entirely within your control? I bet, like the “will I get the job” the question is motivated by impatience – she doesn’t want to wait the extra three weeks before she can pee on that stick!!

But is there any doubt at all that when those three weeks have passed, she’ll be at the pharmacy, buying that test? So the point of asking is … ? (I grin at the youthful impatience displayed by the question. And I always hope that they get the answer that will bring them joy.)

“When will I retire?”  I’d say the answer to that is … when you decide to. No?   :)

Well. Kinda. While “when you decide to” is 100% fair and accurate, this is very often an example of the question being asked not being the question in their heart. Usually it’s not so much “when will I retire”, as “how do I get there”, and that’s a nice, juicy line of exploration. We could talk about what needs to be accomplished first, what the obstacles may be, how to overcome them, how to best prepare for actually being retired. All sorts of interesting stuff in behind that question, that are far more significant than a date on a calendar.

“What does my romantic partner really think about me?” There are Tarot readers who will tackle that question, and maybe the answers they give would be accurate. For me, though, the real question here is why the client feels they can’t ask their partner. Wouldn’t their partner be the obvious source of information about his/her own thoughts? If a client would rather ask a stranger than their own partner, this suggests a lack of trust — in themselves, in the relationship, in their partner’s willingness to be honest. Maybe that lack of trust is warranted, maybe it’s not. This is a very telling question, though perhaps not in the way the client anticipates.

Fascinating, huh? With questions, there is usually a backstory, there are generally further questions within the question. There are sometimes motivations behind the question that are invisible to the person asking. And, together, we pick that apart, get to the heart of the question, and address that.

This is one of the very many things that make reading Tarot so endlessly fascinating. People are just so interesting! And this is why I love my job so very much!