What Game Are You Winning?

This past Saturday, Kat and I provided tarot readings at the Baltimore Country Club for a baby shower event. The event was a beautiful celebration, nestled into an indoor/outdoor space overlooking a vast golf green with gold-orange autumnal foliage framing our view. It’s in moments like these when I really take stock of the fact that Kat and I get to do this… for a living.

Not only are we an integral factor in the celebration of a major life event, we are paid well, and we get to share our knowledge of the esoteric arts with many first-time experiencers. There’s something rather amazing in watching a VP or CEO receive their first Tarot reading and, rather than dismiss the conclusions with a joke or skepticism, vulnerably share that the message resonates with them and even provides some comfort and guidance. It’s the beauty of the game of divination… that what “shouldn’t work” — according to a materialist worldview — actually DOES work. Divination has an undeniable air of authenticity and insight for those who meet the cards, runes, or other system of divination on their own terms. When thoughtfully integrated, divination is a game that reveals the webs of fate, fortune, and skill that guide our lives — it’s as if we are provided with the rules of a game we never previously knew that we were playing.

I love the game analogy primarily because it most clearly understands the way in which divination was understood pre-Enlightenment. Many materialist debunkers like to throw out the fact that Tarot was a game before it was a divinatory tool, as if that somehow invalidates the divinatory lineage of the art. And while Tarot found its origins in a game played by the wealthy merchant class of Italy (and that’s why Tarot is such a great tool for divining around finance), other methods of divination have evolved purely for the purpose of seeing the unseen and knowing the unknown. Yet the idea of the game informs more than fates or entertaining diversions. The idea of the game permeates the very way we live our lives.

We (as a culture) are constantly looking to win, and at the very least not lose, at this journey we call life. We treat our careers, our jobs, our day-to-day with the utmost seriousness, and have an underlying certainty that this game is zero-sum. We constantly worry about our health, our jobs, our homes, our communities, who was doing what with whom and why. We are told, and likely believe, that life is HARD and we are always but one financial disaster away from homelessness or poverty. And the truth is, that life can be very hard. BUT, what if the game is hard… because we continue to choose to live by rules designed by other people that make no actual sense? What happens when we sit down with the “rule book” and realize that a lot of the rules are self-imposed or hopelessly out of date? What if you only wore the clothing you liked? What if you only purchased the things you actually wanted? What if you believed, and behaved, according to your own internal moral code, as opposed to the code of a bunch of social commentators on the Twitter machine? What if, we started thinking that the only things in life that matter are what we make important?

I know the gut reaction to these questions may be “sounds great, but if everyone just lived the way they wanted society would fall apart!”

Would it though? Would it really?

For the better part of my life pop culture assured me that if we didn’t all cohere around very firmly placed social rules… society would certainly collapse! All it takes is one disaster before we are all living like characters out of Lord of the Flies.

For some, the government provides structure, for others religion, and others still seek to create a truly authoritarian order by marrying the two together.

But, I can now point to numerous disasters that I have personally lived through. In fact, one of those disasters took place only two years ago. And it wasn’t anarchy. Society didn’t collapse. The world did not end. Instead, I saw people helping each other, donating time, money, and resources to keep people housed, fed, and healthy through uncertainty.

And that’s pretty much been what happens every time the hurricane, terrorist attack, pandemic, or war comes along… Analysts and pundits predict the collapse of society if we don’t follow obscure and poorly understood rules, and then… people come together to support their neighbors in ways that actually matter. By the time it’s all said and done, most of those recommendations offered by the professional alarmist types pass into the ether — having helped no one in the tangible ways demonstrated by people actually living in and hopefully through the disaster.

I write all of this because, I’ve never encountered the dreaded societal collapse that might come if we all took a deep breath and said, “what would happen if I just stopped treating this all so seriously?”

What if the game was fun, instead of a life or death disaster?

Sometimes Kat and I have fears about owning a small business. It’s early in our journey and we still make mistakes. We also have massive plans for future retreats, an expanded School of Occult Arts, and more… all of which require attendees, materials, time, probably luck, etc. So many details!

When things start looking too serious or stressful Kat and I keep returning to the idea that we are playing a slightly different game in reality than many of our peers. We want to win a different kind of prize than retirement from the corporate world at 65 and having a heart attack shortly thereafter (the statistics on this stuff is sobering). We often joke that we don’t actually want to retire from this work ever (till death do we path and even then…), and even if we slow down one day we’ll still be writing books, lecturing, and probably even teaching on the topics that interest us. Because life is a game, we have chosen to fill our capital “r” Rule Book with mandatory time in nature, prioritizing play (adults really should play), and actively attempting to internalize the fact that this life… well, it really isn’t that serious.

We prioritize health because we want to keep playing, we prioritize our business because we love guiding others on their own magickal journeys, and we prioritize each other because we actually like spending meaningful time together. Our lives sometimes raise an eyebrow from well-meaning friends or family… after all, Occupation: Wizard doesn’t fit nicely on a standard resume. But we aren’t playing the game to have an incredible resume for that executive level corporate job, and that is exactly why we get hired by those executives in the first place! We have a limited time to experience this life and share the magickal world that we feel can heal and support others.

The uncomfortable truth in many tarot readings for our clients who have been “winning” at consensus reality is often found in the form of the Death card.

Nobody is getting out of here alive. All kings, presidents, popes, and paupers kneel before death. No matter if you eat McDonalds every day of the week, or if you subsist entirely on green juices and yoga, nobody will live forever. Ironically, even one of the most well-known “Immortalists” died in 2014. (“While the ideas of immortality burned brightly within him, the living of it often eluded him” says this immortalist’s public relations director). And as sure as the sun will set, Bezos and Musk will also not achieve their envisioned immortality via the reheated, 1950s sci-fi plot of uploading one’s consciousness to a supercomputer (gods and powers willing).

So why then do we live the way we live?

The things we decide are important, meaningful, true, or otherwise will dictate the way we NEED to live.

What things are important to you now? Are any of these just on the list because you were told they should be?

What things would you be doing… if it weren’t a matter of life and death?

In what ways are we actually “living” for things that don’t actually contribute to our health or flourishing?