Wanting is information before it is a plan

THURSDAY, 24 SEPTEMBER

/ pick an option

choose one first, the card can wait

three below. take the one you reacted to, including if the reaction was to dismiss it straight away.

one. the thing you looked up and closed. two. the trip nobody has asked you to go on. three. the want you have already decided is silly.

keep it in mind. the card comes first, yours is underneath everything else.

the knight of cups is the card of the unreasonable pull, and it arrives for women who have spent decades being the sensible one in the room.

there is usually something flickering. a course, a language, a town you looked at on a map for longer than you meant to. and the first move is always to run it past the committee in your head, where it gets voted down for being impractical before anybody has properly heard it.

here is the part worth noticing. wanting something is information before it is ever a plan. it tells you what you are currently short of. a woman who suddenly wants to learn italian is not really being asked a question about italy, she is being told something about how much newness her life contains at the moment.

thursday, and there is enough of the week left to act on something small. you do not have to justify the want in order to keep it. justification belongs to the version with a budget and a date on it, and you are nowhere near that yet.

what is worth leaning into today: letting the want exist for one full day without arguing with it.

what is worth staying away from: requiring a thing to be sensible before you are allowed to be interested in it. that test kills everything at the door.

my advice for today: take the smallest possible piece of it today. the ten minute version, the one phone call, the price looked up properly. interest survives contact with detail far more often than people expect it to.

what is the thing you keep looking up and closing. no need to defend it to me, i only want to know what it is.

option one. the thing you looked up and closed

tabs that get shut before anybody sees them. a night class, a smaller flat somewhere cheaper, a trip on your own, a dog. you look, something moves, you close it.

the closing deserves more attention than the looking. it usually happens the second the practical objection turns up, which is faster than you can weigh anything at all. try leaving it open instead. not applying, not booking. letting it sit there for one evening and seeing whether the interest is still standing in the morning, because a want that survives a night's sleep is a different animal to a passing one.

option two. the trip nobody has asked you to go on

the one with no occasion attached to it. no wedding, nobody to visit, nothing to hold up when somebody asks why you are going.

the missing occasion is the entire obstacle. a great many women will travel a long way for somebody else's event and cannot get out of the door for their own curiosity, and the difference there is permission rather than time or money. the thing that tends to work is a smaller version with a fixed date. two nights somewhere, booked, before the reasons arrive. the reasons always arrive.

option three. the want you have already decided is silly

painting again, singing, riding, writing the thing. it usually turns up with the apology already attached to the front of it.

that word silly is doing an enormous amount of work, and it is worth asking who first used it about you, because it was almost certainly not your word. labels get applied early and they outlast the person who applied them by decades. you are allowed to be a beginner at something now, badly, with nobody watching, for no reason beyond liking it. there is no rule anywhere that a thing has to be good before it is worth doing.