Does absence really make the heart grow fonder as we wander through the madcap adventure of life?
The saying makes zero sense to me. Absence may buff out the rough edges of an awful ex’s character. We may forget the little things about him or her that irritated us. The memory of the guy who abandoned me on a road trip because his spirit guides told him to? It’s a hundred percent fading like a bad dream. Distance makes it easier to forgive and to forget.
But we also tend to forget the actual person as we think of them less and less. And sometimes, occasionally, when we do remember, we think better of them. But is the heart actually growing fonder? Or is it growing more distant? In my experience, hands down, it’s the latter.
And huzzah for that, because the next thing you know, you’ve moved on.
That’s the promise of the Eight of Cups. Cups are about emotion. They are the hearts of the Tarot deck. The keywords for this card are disappointment, abandonment, withdrawing, moving on. A figure walks away from eight cups standing in the foreground of the card. The card is dark and gloomy, and only the moon illuminates the figure’s path. A bad news card—right?
Wrong.
Because while disappointment is, well, disappointing, there are times in all our lives when we need to move on. It may feel impossible, that the heartbreak or disappointment or failure will never go away. But it does. We keep going, we get past it, and new vistas open before us.
So let it fade. Move on. Or as Abigail, my partner at Beanblossom's would say, let that shiitake go!
