The Creative Tarot by Jessa Crispin

Author:Jessa Crispin
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Touchstone

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FIVE OF WANDS

FIVE OF WANDS

Five figures stand at battle. They clash their wands together. One has dropped his wand, and he bends down to pick it up. The other fighters allow him to do this; no one attacks him in his moment of weakness.

The five fighters are in training. No one is seriously injured, no one is trying to draw blood. They are sparring in order to become better fighters. The Five of Wands represents a time of training, one that can be particularly irritating and jolting—no one becomes a great fighter without taking a few blows to the head in the process—but your life is not in danger. It is productive. You are learning from this experience.

Imagine that you’re offstage in the wings. The audience is seated, the spotlight has just turned on. You are about to make your grand entrance, to step into the light and be bathed in glory, but the director pushes you back. “No, you’re not ready.” Again and again, you try to take the stage. Again and again, the director refuses. “You’re not ready.”

That is the feeling of the Five of Wands. You are ready to make your debut, you are ready for fame—or maybe you are just tired of looking at the same canvas, the same manuscript. But it keeps getting sent back for revisions. Every time you think you are finished and finally free of the project, those around you say, “Nope, try again.”

It’s because you haven’t found excellence yet. When you’re interested more in the final product than in getting everything right, a long list of things to fix might seem unfair or tedious. It is so frustrating to be told over and over that something is not right yet. But there’s a reason for this. If something is going out to meet the world, you should make sure that everything is exactly the way you want it. Impatience can lead to sloppiness, and you don’t want that bright spotlight to show the whole world that your shoelaces are untied and you’ve memorized only 75 percent of your lines.

I think of Coco Chanel, who was ruthless with her own clothing. Even as her models were about to take the stage and the clothes shown to media and buyers and clients for the first time, she was tearing out seams, restitching shoulders (she was obsessed with fitting the perfect shoulder), and sewing the models into their clothes. She would rather make the audience wait a few more moments than send out her clothes imperfect. When other people would have shrugged and said, “Good enough,” she couldn’t let it go.

Which is, of course, part of why she is a legend.

Creatives with this perfectionist streak—the director David Fincher, whose actors have moaned about his endless takes and retakes; the writer Henry James, whose manuscripts show obsessive rewrites and edits; the divine Coco Chanel—get reputations for being difficult or obsessed.

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