Last weekend, for three days in a row, I drew The Tower for my morning tarot meditation. 

The Tower is a card of sudden change and destruction. Traditionally, it depicts lightning striking a tower that is on fire and crumbling, as two figures fall from it. It’s not often seen as a positive card, because while it can be the catalyst for positive change, in the moment, it tends to hurt. 

Each one of the three days that I pulled The Tower, I was wrestling with a lot of anxiety. Seeing that card first thing in the morning didn’t help.

One of the days that I pulled The Tower, my parents were coming to visit. We have a complicated and, in many places, painful history, and I was already nervous that the relative peace we’d been enjoying recently would fall apart when we were together in person rather than just over the phone. I spent a lot of the day feeling like I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop and one of us to blow up. 

It didn’t happen. We actually had quite a nice time, and the exhaustion I felt at the end of the day had more to do with my unnecessary worry than it did with anything else. 

That night, I pulled The Chariot before I went to bed. The Chariot is all about moving forward, about making the choice to keep moving, about not clinging to the parts of the past that will hinder your progress. In this instance, it was a reminder to let go of hurt and bitterness and let what positive change is happening happen. 

It wasn’t until the next night that I fully appreciated the lesson to be learned from those cards. Change is disorienting, and that’s true whether it’s a painful change or a positive one. It takes time to adjust perspective. That’s okay. Trouble arises when we resist the change. After all, change is life’s only constant. Accepting that is what allows us to grow. 
So, I’m making a conscious effort now to let go of the anxiety around change of all sorts, despite the fact that I am very much a creature of habit. I am going to work to embrace change in my life, even when, in the moment, it might hurt.