As a race we’re increasingly creating a world of instant-everything. Instant feedback, instant validation, instant results, instant responses, instant justice, instant opinions, instant noodles. We want everything really quickly. Perhaps it’s a way to feel in control, a way to one-up the rapid movement of time and change that seems to be hurtling faster all the time.

The Hanged Man asks you to consider what it means to pause. Pause before you speak. Pause before you make up your mind. Pause before you decide. Pause before you think you know it all.

A major part of any inward journey is heading right up into spaces in your being that will require you to pause.

To take a moment. To allow a slow unfolding. To give things time. To feel your way through uncertainty. To sit with discomfort and do absolutely nothing about it for long periods of time.

And a major part of confronting these spaces will mean facing that innate resistance to all of it.

In the Hanged Man’s suspension, I see surrender. A reminder that not everything needs to be figured out immediately. There is power in knowing your place in the grander scheme of things, of realising how little is really in one’s control, and finding joy in flexibility of not figuring it all out. This allows for that little play for things to emerge, and gives you the permission to change your mind, to stretch and flex, and to grow.

Can you shine a light on those aspects of yourself that resist waiting and watching, that fight the pause, that grow quickly uncomfortable with uncertainty, and look at what that urgency might be about?

A good place to start is to see dow it feels to suspend action. To suspend logic. To suspend the need to solve everything instantly. What happens in your body when you suspend the need for certainty? How does it really feel, to just for a moment, let go the need for instant-everythings?

One year ago: Slice of life
Two years ago: Fields of gold
Four years ago: Every day