Tarot Abstinence

I recently got a job offer after ten months of intensive hunting. I had some reservations about the position, but there were also a lot of good reasons to say yes. I wound up accepting the offer, and so far the job is going great.

While I was mulling over this big decision, I debated using my tarot cards to help me. But something held me back. I wound up not seeking any tarot guidance at all, either from my own decks or from my friends who are readers.

This may seem counterintuitive—after all, what are tarot cards good for if not to guide us in making important choices? I’ve helped tons of clients weigh the pros and cons of job offers for years, so why didn’t I do that for myself?

For one thing, I knew that, even if this position turned out to be imperfect, logically I still should probably take it. It was in my chosen field, the pay range was appropriate, I'd been hunting for nearly a year, and none of my reservations were really alarming.

So if I’d asked “Should I say yes to this job?” and had drawn some extremely negative cards—I would probably still have said yes to it. And then gone in with my shields up, prepared for battle.

Somehow though, asking felt as if it would weaken, rather than strengthen, me. I’m still not entirely sure why. I believe in getting as many viewpoints as possible from sources I trust before making a great leap. And my cards are certainly a trusted source.

I did a reading for myself after accepting the job but before my first day of work, asking what I should expect from the new position. I drew a card that shows a bunch of guys whacking each other with sticks. (Oww...)

This card is about a competitive, creative, and chaotic environment. My new job does have some of those qualities. There are tons of projects going on at any given moment, and my role is to balance my time and energy among them all. But the posturing and ego-brandishing aspects of this card (so far at least) don’t seem to be in play at my office.

Part of me feels cowardly for not having done the reading earlier. I wonder if I was partially protecting myself from fear. Starting off in a new work environment, where I didn’t know anyone, was a terrifying prospect (it’s been over a decade since I’ve been in that situation). Maybe some part of my unconscious mind wanted to limit my access to “bad cards” that might have made me feel even more nervous.

Are there questions you wouldn’t want to ask in a tarot reading? Are there certain moments when it’s better to follow where logic leads, without bringing intuition into the process? Or am I simply a doofus for having held off on asking these questions until it was potentially too late?