Death Card

by Guy Spiro

Change is often scary. I think we all like to see ourselves as adventurous, welcoming challenges and changes with a hearty laugh and contempt for fear. This is not how it usually occurs in reality. Most often, people stay rooted in their ruts, enduring the pain until it finally becomes more painful to stay than to change.

Sometimes when contemplating one course of action or another I will get out my tarot deck and pull a card. The most recent time I did this, the Death card came up. The Death card tends to send a chill up the spine when it is pulled. This is an instinctive reaction which is understandable. Most tarot card readers will tell you, however, that the Death card rarely means the death of the person in question. The Death card really means change -- death of the physical body being only the most extreme example.

Death is, after all, just a change, a transition from one reality to another. In that sense, all of change is, to some degree, a death. It is no wonder then that we tend to fear change. We don't know what is on the other side. We don't know how this or that move will affect us. We don't know how others will react to changes in our lives. We do know how things are now. "Better the devil we know than the one that may replace him" is what tends to be our mindset.

As comfortable as we may think we are with our present reality, change is inevitable. While it seems that the more things change the more they stay the same, change is one of the only constants. And while some changes are for the worse, my experience teaches me that most changes are for the better. Even when a change seems to be for the worse we usually find somewhere down the road that it really was for the better.

When one door closes, another one always opens. Step through it with confidence.