Trusting the Process
“Can you trust yourself when the tower falls?” - the question tumbles from my mouth. My client rolls laughter across their face, a thunderous response and they tell me it’s an ominous question. Although, it in’t meant to be.
The tarot card The Tower is the 16th card in the Major Arcana. “The Tower is commonly interpreted as meaning danger, crisis, destruction, and liberation. It is associated with sudden unforeseen change.” To me, it represents the destruction of something elaborately tall, like a lego set built by a toddler tumbling down. The tower is nothing more than a play thing, the crash of small plastic bricks shattering along the floor, the construction of something unreal.
Yet, when a two year old watches their tower fall it is both exciting and terrible. To them, their work has broken. The devastation of the loss of their hard work is the most loss they’ve ever experienced in their whole two years of life. Can you imagine working so hard on something, just to have it all fall to pieces, your small hands gathering the lost pieces from under the couch. Scanning the room with squinted eyes for each piece that’s been swept to its unintended home. To be required, to rebuild the tower?
Of course, you can. You’ve built your own lego tower. Your own building blocks teetered high above your curly, soft-haired, pink-cheeked head. And metaphorically you understand this as the self you built to survive high school. Was that version of you a shell, a try, a tower of identity? Has it toppled from the bottom as you’ve grown into who you are now? Did you try on a new tower of self in college? When you got a job after college?
Image Credit: Cecilia’s Tarot
Every time our tower has fallen, we have resigned (or not) to rebuild our tower. We can rely on the process, faith, route mechanism, that the universe has our back. Many clients, may friends, and I don’t struggle with the psychological work it takes to trust the process. However, when it comes to creating something (a business, a job, a book, a painting, an identity, etc.) trusting the process is only one part of the work.
When we want to build something new, something also has to die. It’s natural. However, we need to trust ourselves in the process — not just the process itself.
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