The Hanged Man
I came back to Leicester twenty-one years ago after having left to go to university, vowing never to return. In the twenty-one years I’ve been here, I’ve almost left again on numerous occasions but never quite made it out.
In three weeks time the lease on this house will be up and I will leave again on a new adventure. Even though I went to London today and spent a boiling hot afternoon lugging a gigantic Ikea box up and down pontoons and into the boat so that we could build a sofa, it still doesn’t feel like we’re actually going. Maybe that’s because of all those near misses.
It doesn’t feel like we are staying either. This house is half packed up and getting emptier by the day. I’ve finished work and Oscar has finished GCSE’s and secondary school, but nothing else has started yet. We are waiting. It’s an active waiting that involves lots of boxes and running around, but it’s still waiting.
You may not be entirely surprised to hear that there is a tarot card for this.
The Hanged Man is a card that perfectly describes this kind of limbo. He is usually shown hanging upside down from a tree like structure by one leg. He hasn’t come to any harm, he is simply waiting for the moment when circumstance rights him again and he can go about his business.
The Hanged Man turns up when we are between phases in our life. We know one way of being is ending and another is beginning. When he makes an appearance it is usually that we can see the end and the beginning but we are unable to make significant progress towards or away from either. The biggest thing he teaches us is that we have to trust to time to bring about the necessary changes.
Depending on which tarot deck you use, he sometimes has stuff falling out of his pockets. Often, in order for new things to come into our lives, we have to let go of old things. We have to make room for the things we will need in the future and we can’t do that if we are clinging on to the things of the past. Human beings (me) are not very good at letting go of things though. We tend to cling on to things we know or think we know we will need.
When we are in the world of the Hanged Man, we have no choice but to let go of things, because we are attempting to stay in balance in a world where everything is upside down and we don’t have time to stop things falling out of our pockets. Sometimes the things we lose are material things. Sometimes they are states of mind or beliefs that have to go.
Hanging upside down for a bit and losing some stuff won’t kill us, but none of it is very comfortable. The best thing we can do is try to stop the blood rushing to our head, accept that this is a temporary state and hang in there.