Card of the Here and Now: 4 of Cups

To further my personal understandings of the cards, as well as supplement the little white book I send out with the decks (until the eventual release of the Ellis decK companion book) as well as a break from the graphic novel I'm working on presently, I thought it would be fun to start posting cards and talking about them a bit here in the blog.  I'm taking the first one from my Card of the Day on the Ellis decK app which I like to use as a study prompt myself.

Card of the Here and Now:
4 of Cups

What's Happening on this Card?

Here we have a young woman of the water realm (emotions). She has three cups stacked in front of her rather carelessly. She has either lost appreciation for them or wasn't consciously attentive to her stacking job. A fourth cup comes riding in on a wave and is seconds away from knocking her on the head, giving her the wakeup call she needs to get out of the doldrums.

Attitude of the Card

The young person in all of us that rolls their eyes at everything. Often when we have something good go on for long enough, be it a job, relationship, project, or influence, we get so used to it that we take it for granted. After we take it for granted long enough, we can get sick of it or lose our appreciation for it. Something shiny and inspiring no longer has the novelty it once did. Maybe we used to love iced cream and get excited about it, but then we started eating it every day. Then we moved from surprise to expectation to boredom. From boredom, we move into a careless apathy, not sure what to do with ourselves. In a culture where we constantly get new everything thanks to our technology, many of us think this is the best way to be: the first kid on the block to be "over it." The fourth cup could be the ensuing stomach ache after too much of a good thing. The good news is this knock on the head should inspire us into doing something different.

Energy of the Card

This card is the standstill that happens to the uninspired. Looking at the same things over and over again, and searching for motivation in what has already been done, a stagnation occurs. The futility of trying to get inspired can be just as maddeningly dull as the boredom itself if we stick to what we already know. Especially if we're taking it for granted. The fourth cup will usually come and knock over our untidy kingdom enough to get things moving again. 

The Judgement

The misfortune here isn't that we may get a knock on the head. The problem is we've gotten lazy. When thinking on this card, we consider where in life we feel like a know-it-all and we've stopped listening.