Why I Don't Predict the Future in Tarot Readings

I was gathering my things for an evening of readings when my seven-year-old daughter spotted my crystal ball. She picked it up, turned it over in her hands, fascinated by the weight of it.

"What's this for?" she asked.

"People use it to tell the future," I said.

She looked at me, confused. A few seconds passed while she worked through the logic of this. Then: "Why would you want to tell the future? It's going to happen soon anyway!"

I didn't have an answer ready.

It's such a simple question. The kind only a child asks because they haven't yet learned not to. And yet it cut straight to something I've been circling around in my practice for years.

I don't often work with prediction in my readings. When I turn over the future card, I don't tell people what's going to happen. I tell them what to bear in mind as they move forward: a quality to cultivate, a pattern to notice, an invitation rather than a prophecy.

Because the way we change the future is by making changes in the present.

We have this cultural anxiety about time travel. You've heard of the Butterfly Effect thought experiment: if you could go back in time, you'd have to be careful not to step on a butterfly. One small action in the past could cascade into enormous changes, unraveling everything we know. It's a terrifying idea, and we return to it again and again in our stories.

But here's the thing we forget: every moment, right now, we're standing in the future's past.

Why don't we give our actions in the present the same weight we'd give to hypothetical actions in an imagined past? Why do we treat the now as less significant than a butterfly we'll never actually step on?

That's why I read cards the way I do.

It is about the future, yes. But only by looking at the present. By looking at what brought us here, at the patterns we're standing in, at the threads we're weaving without quite realising it. When someone turns over the Tower, we don't just see destruction coming, we see the foundations that were already crumbling, the structure that needed to fall. When the Two of Swords appears, we don't predict indecision, we illuminate the choice that's already being avoided.

Once we understand that, once we see where we are and how we got here, the future stops being something that simply happens to us. My daughter asked why we'd want to tell the future when it's coming anyway. She was right.

It is coming. 

But we create it.