Trying to Make Sense of the Cards
Man, sometimes you just pull a card and feel like you’ve been hit over the head with a pillow. That’s how the Five of Wands always landed for me. Every book, every website I went to, they all said the same stuff: competition, rivalry, constructive conflict, maybe a struggle of wills. Okay, great. But what does that actually look like when you’re just sitting there, trying to figure out if you should take that new job or not?
I swear, I spent weeks just staring at that picture. Five guys, all waving sticks around, looking completely disorganized. Are they fighting? Are they practicing? Are they just messing around? It felt so damn abstract. I needed something simple, something I could actually use. I’m not running a medieval tournament; I’m trying to decide if I should buy a new couch or repair the old one.
I tried all the usual methods. I meditated on it. I journaled about it. I even taped the damn card to my fridge, hoping osmosis would kick in. Nothing. The interpretation stayed muddy. It was like I was looking for a single, crisp answer in a card that is literally defined by chaos and multiple moving parts. I was stuck in the traditional definition loop, and it was driving me nuts.
My Real-Life Five of Wands Disaster
Funny how life gives you the precise lesson you need, usually when you are least prepared for it. For me, that clarity came through a completely unnecessary home improvement project—painting the entire upstairs hallway. It should have been a simple two-day job, right? It turned into three weeks of pure, unadulterated clashing ego, energy, and opinions.
I decided to get the whole family involved because, hey, bonding opportunity! And this is where the Five of Wands showed up in full force. We weren’t fighting each other, not really, but man, were we fighting the project, and each other’s methods. My partner insisted we use expensive, fast-drying primer because they read about it once. My eldest kid decided the ceiling should actually be a shade of neon green they saw on TikTok, even though we agreed on eggshell white. My mother-in-law, who was visiting, kept trying to reorganize the tools and told me I was holding the brush wrong.
It was total gridlock. Everyone had immense energy. Everyone had good intentions. Everyone was wielding their own ‘wand’—their strong, individual opinion—but none of those wands were lined up. We had three different opinions on the right paint roller to use, four different ideas on the best order of operations, and five different schedules for who was going to work when.
I remember standing there, covered in paint splatter, watching my partner and my mother-in-law arguing heatedly over whether the cutting-in should happen before or after the rolling. And suddenly, it just clicked. I saw the card in real life.
- Wand One (My Partner): Efficiency and high-cost tools.
- Wand Two (My Kid): Creative vision and trend-following.
- Wand Three (My Mother-in-Law): Experience and traditional methods.
- Wand Four (Me): Just wanting the damn thing finished on budget and on time.
- Wand Five (The Project Itself): The resistance and the sheer weight of too many cooks.
That’s what the card is! It’s not necessarily malice; it’s just a gigantic waste of focused energy. Everyone is contributing, but the combined effort is producing noise instead of progress. The true message isn’t about beating the others; it’s about getting everyone to stop waving their wands independently and start pushing the same direction.
The Simple, Raw Interpretation I Came Up With
After about twenty minutes of just standing there letting the revelation sink in, I shoved everyone out of the hallway, grabbed a cheap composition notebook, and wrote down the simple translation I was looking for. No fancy words, no spiritual fluff.
If you get the Five of Wands, here is what is happening:
It means there is too much noise. Seriously, that’s it. It’s not necessarily a bad fight, but it’s a fight of focus. You have high energy, but that energy is fragmented. Everyone is trying to be the hero, or everyone has a different ‘best way’ to do things, and the result is a massive slow-down.
You need to stop and choose a lane. You need to identify whose idea is actually going to move the needle right now, or you need to step up and tell everyone else to put their damn sticks down and follow your lead for five minutes. The struggle itself is preventing the solution.
I realized the whole “constructive conflict” idea means that this stage is necessary. You have to hash out those differing views to get to a stronger result later. But when you pull the card, you’re usually in the thick of the hashing, and it feels like crap. So the message is: get it over with quickly. Stop messing around. Force the decision.
When I finally got back to my own life situation—the job change I was considering—the card’s message was blindingly clear. The conflict wasn’t external; it was internal. My five wands were: ambition, fear of failure, financial security, comfort, and the opinion of my old boss still echoing in my head. I wasn’t moving forward because all those internal voices were yelling at once. I needed to pick which voice to mute and which path to start walking down, even if that path felt chaotic at first.
So yeah, forget the fancy books. The Five of Wands is the sound of five people arguing over paint rollers. Once you hear that noise, you know exactly what to do: shut it down and pick one color. Problem solved.
The Simple Takeaway: High effort, low synergy. You are burning energy without moving forward. Pick one leader or one method immediately to break the deadlock.
