I remember a Friday in college, when I noticed one of my dormmates wandering around depressed. "What's going on?" I asked her. "I don't know," she replied and left it at that. I had a sneaking suspicion it had to do with her and her best friend competing for my roommate, something I was uniquely privy to. Before I could confirm that with her, she disappeared for two days.

On Sunday, she popped up out of nowhere. "Where the hell were you?" I asked. "I just went out to the beach," she replied. "Are you still depressed?" I asked. "Nope, I figured some stuff out, and now I'm good." She then turned around and left.

This cryptic exchange has always stood out in my head. I think because I was going through my own depressions at the time. I was confused how she could liberate herself in just two days, when I felt like I was doing the right thing by staring out the window dwelling on my problems for hours on end. I couldn't explain why she could be depressed on Friday, and not depressed on Sunday simply by "getting space" and "figuring it out." What did she figure out?

But now, I think I'm closer to understanding the mechanics of how this kind of liberation happens. And I think it has something to do with what I learned from Tarot.

I first got into Tarot a year ago, when my friend Rusty gave me a reading. My question for him was, "What do I have to do to achieve more work-life fulfillment." He laid out the cards, walked me through the meanings, asking me questions about this or that, and I found my mind breaking through barriers, and focusing in on certain things that were really powerful for me. Around that time, the iPhone App Store was about to launch, and I was wavering between trying to make my own stake as an independent developer, or continuing being an unhappy freelancer. The cards and the readings just kept whispering to me to pursue my dreams, to do something that scared me. For me, this meant creating my own ideas, rather than working on other people's. And this was even before the App Store opened.

While the conclusion of this story is that I decided to make an iPhone app for Tarot—which turned out to be a hit—the real story is that for two months after that reading, I felt charged with a renewed sense of purpose in work, something that had previously been a rare experience for me since 1998. And I knew I could credit Tarot for doing this, that somehow it had triggered life-change in me.

And here's how I explain that transformation. Our consciousness is like a fisherman on a lake. We spend most of the time gliding around the surface, looking for answers to our problems. But we often never really find them until we stop, make a guess that there's something deep down there, and cast our line to grab them.

In a Tarot reading, the cards branch out all over the place in your mind, triggering associations beneath the surface that you may have never considered for years. It then drops hints at you that here, right here, is where you might want to cast your line. Tarot is called a divination tool, which reminds me of those divining rods that people used to carry that would pull them to an obscure source of water.

I think that taking a vacation does the same thing. It removes you from the currents and eddies running through your life, and allows you to take a casual scan of your entire lake.

Or to put it in engineering terms, only when all the noise in your life is quiet, does the signal finally emerge.

All in all, I've summarized this idea into two principles that relate to each other:

How can you be happy if you don't proceed in the direction of your most important wants/needs/values?
And then this one:
Introspective devices, like soul-searching, give quiet, but important voices a platform.
I believe that it is absolutely essential to our happiness to find within ourselves the ignored and marginalized voices that are whispering to us every day about our dreams and aspirations. Those voices need to be recognized and given a megaphone. Whether you take a vacation, get a Tarot reading, or meditate, somehow you must clear everything standing in the way of what you genuinely want in life. The blockers could be anything, from fear, to distractions, to being set in your ways, or discouragement from others. Whatever it is, we must have the courage to plumb the depths of our souls to find what it is that we truly want.