Listen to Your Intuition

Hope your week's been going well. We finally got a bit of rain down here in Houston; we really, really needed it, too!

Have spent the past week doing the interview thing -- my industry got slammed bad by the stimulus bill and we went through a second round of layoffs (and I got caught up this time!)

So how can the "stimulus bill" not stimulate something? Well, what's happened is that there are government funds allocated for particular industries in the bill. So ... all those industries who were already planning and budgeting for expenditures this year are now saying "Wait, you mean we don't have to spend our own money -- we can spend someone else's?! Let's hold off on our purchases and wait and see what happens!" So, rather than stimulating things, it's had the opposite effect -- slamming on the brakes on growth!

I can't blame the industry -- I'd do the same thing in their shoes. The good news is that eventually this will all go away and things will be able to get back to normal.

So much for my view on economics -- how about that reading instead!

We'll again pull two cards -- the first suggests something we should focus on for the week. The second suggests things we might consider in order to fully benefit from the attributes of the first card. Our cards this week are:



Queen of Pentacles
(Reversed)





Queen of Swords






Finally! An upright card -- we've sure been going through a long stretch of reversals lately. Have been seeing some familiar faces a lot, too.

The Queen of Pentacles has been visiting us a lot. We've already talked a little bit about this courtly lady -- she's passionate, she's caring, she's trustworthy, etc. We've talked about how reversals can distort the message of the card -- from trustworthy to non-trustworthy, from caring to indifferent, etc.

What I think's happening this time around is that the distortion is heading in the other direction -- it's extending the original meaning of the card. As we all know, too much of something is sometimes troublesome. For this particular situation, I'm keying in on the "caring" issue. "Caring" suggests feelings and emotions. We often speak of a caring person as being passionate. But ... when you become overly passionate -- you end out letting your emotions get in the way of your observations.

We should always be wary of too much of anything -- what we need is a balance in order to apply all our skills and experiences to guide us along. When we let passions override our other tendencies, we can stray off-course.

Our second card, The Queen of Swords, is exactly the card we want to help out. This queen suggests "street smarts" -- she's had some tough lessons in her life and has learned from all of them. One way to think about "street smarts" (or learning based on experience) is that you don't often have to carefully analyze situations -- you quickly reach a strong gut-feeling, or an intuition, about the proper response.

So, our reversed Queen of Pentacles is listening too closely to her heart -- and our experienced Queen of Swords suggests we listen to our intuition as well in order to keep us from over-reacting.

After all, we've paid a lot to attend the school of hard knocks -- and have learned some great lessons from it. Why waste these learnings -- let's take them into consideration. It may be that our intuition, rather than our emotions, can guide us most effectively for now.