I like to pull a single tarot card each day as a tool for reflection as part of My (Ideal) Morning Routine. Yesterday morning, I pulled the Death card and got very excited. That might sound a bit goth, but in tarot, pulling Death isn’t literal. My deck isn’t trying to tell me I’m going to die. What this card really represents is change and transformation: something has to end for something new to grow. The analysis for my specific deck (Marigold Tarot) describes it as follows:
“Death is depicted as a farmer. His head is haloed with a pattern resembling wheat, his hand holding a short sickle traditionally used for harvesting crops. Death operates as the farmer does: allowing the seeds of life to have their time to grow and flourish before making room for new life to take its course. The land on which he stands is currently barren, but growth occurs behind him, implying that new life will soon take root.”
I fell in love with this card as a symbol in my mid-twenties when I first started learning about tarot. Fresh out of college I was struggling with student loans and already 6 months into my first post-grad job feeling absolutely bored out of my mind, unsure what to do next. I had gone through school and was finally starting my adult life but it felt like a dead end. This was really scary. My whole life I’d been told “go to school, get a degree, and you’ll have a good life.” No one really talked about what a “good life” was or what to consider beyond that.
One day, I stumbled on an article about coding and a wave of people finding second careers in software because of coding bootcamps. It caught my attention. I spent a good chunk of my adolescence on the computer and even worked in computer labs in college teaching both students and faculty how to use software. I hadn’t really built software before though. The closest I’d gotten was customizing my MySpace layout in the early aughts (which I loved doing).
After reading this article, I became kind of hyper-fixated on the idea of learning to code. I looked into bootcamps and even applied to a couple, but couldn’t justify the upfront cost and loss of income when I was already buried in student loans. So I chose to bet on myself. The Internet had tons of resources and curriculums available, I just had to do it.
I spent a year learning to code over nights and weekends. I lived in Dayton, OH at the time and was working for a music publishing company. They knew I was investing in technical skills and learning to program. One day their software developer announced he would be leaving for another opportunity and they tapped my shoulder to see if I’d be interested in the role. I’d be the only developer so I’d have to keep learning on the job, but I would now have 40 hours per week to focus on it rather than cramming it into nights and weekends and receive a small raise too. I took it. It was really hard but I learned new things every single day and felt a rush every time I managed to solve a problem with code. This was the start of my dead end opening up into a winding road.
It’s been about a decade since that pivot. My life looks completely different now because of that transformation. And it started from what felt like an ending: a dead-end job, a degree that didn’t seem to matter, and absolutely no idea what should come next.
That’s why I love pulling Death. It’s a reminder that the scary, uncertain, “I have no idea what I’m doing” moments are usually the ones that matter most. The past year or so has been really hard for me in a lot of ways. So pulling this card yesterday and sitting with what it means, remembering how important it is to stay open when everything feels uncertain, was a reminder I really needed.