Adam Oster, Novelist

As a person with a history deeply set in religion, I find myself often looking at the events in my life with an eye toward trends and movements toward something. Religion likes to talk about fate a lot, even if many of them like to focus on the idea of free will. And fate is something that I think all of us think about rather often, even if we don’t actually believe in it.

As someone open to the breadth of humanity’s thoughts on things, I sometimes like to check out my horoscope. Look, they’re terribly written and generally run the gamut from as horribly vague as “expect something good to happen today” to impossibly specific “you may receive an angry phone call from someone who lives far away” (these examples are the horoscope for yesterday and today for me). I read them with a grain of salt, usually because I have something on my mind that I’m hoping to gain some sort of new perspective on.

Don’t get me wrong, I still consider horoscopes to be an incredibly hokey form of short fiction which shouldn’t be taken any more seriously than the words inside a fortune cookie, but at the same time, I find the concepts of astrology incredibly interesting. While I’m not one who likes to believe that we are stuck within any one certain fate, I’m incredibly intrigued by the idea that the very stars you are born under can tell you anything about your life.

I’m a Virgo. And nearly every description of a Virgo fits me almost perfectly. But, at the same time, I could say the same for the attributes of a Cancer or an Aries or, well, I think I could find myself in the description for many of them. That might be a portion of the brilliance of astrology in that it allows you to find yourself in the description, no matter what the description is.

But here is where I find myself most interested in things like astrology, or tarot cards, or any form of fortune telling. They often give you a framework for self reflection. I don’t want to downplay the reality that anyone lives in, so if you live under the idea that palm reading is a legitimate telling of a person’s fate, I’m cool with that for you. But what I can tell you is that if someone tells you that you are going to have a good day, and you put any level of stock into that person’s reason for telling you that, your chances for having a good day are better than they are without that message.

If someone says that there is a hard decision coming in your future that you shouldn’t be so ready to turn down, you’re going to spend the next few days looking for the hard decision while also wondering what it could be, and rethinking all of the things you’ve been avoiding thinking about.

In other words, I’m a huge fan of the psychic and astrological arts, not necessarily because I believe they hold any insight from the supernatural, but because they give you a different way of thinking about things. One of the things I like most about Tarot readings is that they give you incredibly basic prompts for how to think about something, like “oh there’s this bad thing in your past that’s been haunting you and it’s causing you to make stupid decisions today” and you’ll go, you know what, you’re right, I wonder if there’s anything I can do to stop allowing that to happen.

I own a deck of tarot cards and give myself readings somewhat frequently, especially when I’m feeling emotional but don’t actually know why I’m feeling that way. It gives me new ways to think about whatever is hiding in the background of my mind and often illuminates problems that I didn’t even realize I was having. And it allows me to actually frame my issues in completely new ways. It’s like having a set of writing prompts for your life.

Maybe these things are all based on nothing, but the way in which they are crafted means that they actually can have some of the most wonderful benefits. As long as you realize that nothing, not even fate, is set in stone.