“When faced with two choices, simply toss a coin. It works not because it settles the question for you, but because in that brief moment when the coin is in the air, you suddenly know what you are hoping for.”
– Unknown
There’s a scene in the Matrix trilogies where Neo, the protagonist, meets the Oracle, a chain smoking, cookie baking grandmother who can see the future. Neo’s gone to her to learn whether he’s “The One” who’s fated to defeat the enemy.
Although he is The One, she lets him continue to believe he isn’t, and tells him he’s in control of his own life.
She doesn’t tell him the truth; she tells him what he needs to hear.
We were at the Boulder Creek Festival, a weekend fete in Boulder, Colorado with a huge array of vendors, music, and food.
I saw the sign while we were wandering through a maze of pop-up canopies: “Palm Readings – $20.”
I dragged him over. He handed me a twenty with a wry grin and told me to have fun, then wandered off to watch people scaling the climbing wall.
I watched him go, and wondered at how we were so alike and so different at the same time.
The palm reader looked like a perfectly normal middle-aged woman—no turban, no white dreadlocks, no purple business card revealing her name to be “Ananda Moonbeam.” She gestured me to sit on the white plastic folding chair and asked me to place my hands on the table.
She glanced up at him, fading into the crowd, then looked at my palm.
“He’s not the one,” she said.
She said I’d meet the love of my life at work, and we would have at least 3 children and as many as 7, if we wanted.
I balked. She was wrong. He was the one.
And so I proved her wrong by treating him like the one until the day he died.
Later, I thought, she didn’t tell me the truth, she told me what I needed to hear.
I grew up thinking that tarot cards were “occult” and “of the devil.”
Now I understand why that’s silly. They don’t predict the future. They may not even tell us the truth.
They tell us what we need to hear.
Last week, I was meeting with a group of colleagues about a project we’d been working on for almost a year.
One of our members was concerned about moving forward. Her intuition told her—quite adamantly—that we should wait. That the time wasn’t right.
Everyone else in the group felt just the opposite. Now was the perfect time to move forward.
We held a vote. Now we are moving forward with conviction.
I wondered if her intuition wasn’t telling the group the truth, but it was telling us what we needed to hear.
Today, I inadvertently became the oracle.
A friend was bemoaning a new arrangement at one of her part-time jobs, and I sensed there was something more there.
We talked about why she worked there, and what she gained from it. It wasn’t much, either financially or emotionally. She allowed herself the possibility of leaving, which hadn’t been on the table.
Did I tell her the truth? I tried to, but maybe it doesn’t matter.
Maybe I just told her what she needed to hear.
Maybe we already know everything. We just need the oracle to help us remember.
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