The Wisdom of the 4 of Wands

The 4 of Wands is a card that usually heralds celebration after achievement, establishing a firm base for future growth, or negotiating agreement among opposing factions to restore harmony and balance. My shorthand for it?

Moving in, moving up, moving on, moving out… a happy relocation.

It’s a great card, though perhaps a surprising one, when you look at a situation in life that seem to have no answers — or at least none that make sense to you.

A client of mine had two used-to-be-BFFs that are now at swords-point, and have been for some time. She did her best to remain neutral and stay the sane voice in the middle. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t.

But eventually, she got very tired of the histrionics and asked me what to do.

The 4 of Wands came up.

“Relocation?” she asked, bewildered. “But that’s what this problem is all about!” (The situation had to do with a German Shepherd to be rehomed.)

“The relocation,” I said firmly, “has to be you. There are times that even if the answer seems crystal-clear to you, not all parties will see it that way. And ‘you are not the boss of them,’ remember?”

She chuckled. “I get that from my three year old all the time.”

“Exactly,” I said. “But this is not a three year old situation you can send to the corner for a timeout.

“What are you getting the longer you are in the situation?”

“Frustrated.”

“Because?”

“Because they aren’t listening to reason.”

“Your reason,” I reminded her, “isn’t how they see reason. And we can’t change other people; we can only change ourselves. So…”

She sighed. “So if I don’t like the situation, I just leave?”

“Yes. Maybe for a while, and maybe for good, but you leave it to settle without you, since you don’t really have a part to play.”

“But I still care about them,” she objected.

I gave her my best teacher-looking-over-the-eyeglasses stare. “You can care from a distance. You can wish them heart’s ease and a settling of the situation. And if they NEVER get it settled? That’s on them.”

There are often situations in life where it feels like we KNOW what needs to be done. We think we’re objective, we think we have all the parameters sussed out…but nothing seems to move the situation, or even the parties involved.

In that case, it’s time to relocate your emotions about it. And your actions.

Use it to look at past situations in your life where you were immovable. What happened in the end? Either it got fixed, or it had to be abandoned. Either way, you learned and you moved on, didn’t you?

Sometimes Karma is a tough teacher, but It gets the lesson across. And once you get the lesson, move forward in your life. Move on, move out, move up…but move.