The High Priestess: silence before opinion

Just. Shut. Up.

We live surrounded by commentary. Every event produces an immediate analysis, every behaviour requires an interpretation, every feeling a label, every uncertainty an explanation. We are asked what we think before we have had the time to understand what we have seen, and the ability to formulate an opinion quickly is often mistaken for intelligence, confidence or even awareness.

And we are gradually losing our tolerance for silence, ambiguity and mystery.

A situation feels strange, so we analyse it. Someone behaves unexpectedly, so we assign a motive. We experience an emotion, so we rush to define it.

The danger is not that these explanations are necessarily wrong, it is that they often arrive too soon.

This is where The High Priestess becomes interesting to me.

Traditionally, she sits between two pillars, guarding something that is not immediately accessible. She does not offer an answer, perform an action or try to convince anyone of anything. Her power lies precisely in the fact that she does not rush to make everything explicit.

In a culture obsessed with visibility, she represents what remains hidden.
In a culture of constant opinion, she represents observation before judgement.
And in a culture that fills almost every available second with information, she represents the possibility of silence.

Silence can be the space in which complexity is allowed to remain complex for a little longer.

Understanding needs time before it can become language, experiences lose something when we explain them too quickly and some questions become less interesting the moment we force them into an answer.

Perhaps this is what we are also losing when we lose our relationship with mystery.

Mystery does not mean believing in the irrational or abandoning critical thinking: it means accepting that reality is sometimes larger than our current ability to explain it. That something can be meaningful before it is measurable and we can notice something without immediately knowing what to call it.

There is a form of intelligence in being able to remain there.

The High Priestess questions another modern reflex: the belief that everything must immediately become clear.

Perhaps not knowing is not always a gap to fill. Perhaps sometimes it is a space worth protecting.

So here is today’s mirror:

Where in your life are you trying to define, explain or resolve something before it has had the time to reveal what it actually is?

The cards are simply the excuse.
The real subject has always been us.

See you in the next mirror.