Man, I gotta tell you, the last six months, I was toast. Just absolutely burnt out. My brain felt like a bowl of cold oatmeal. You know that feeling? When you are technically “resting,” but your energy levels are still sitting on flat zero, and the thought of starting anything new just makes you want to crawl under the covers and stay there forever.
I was in this rut, a real deep one. I had all these ideas floating around for new blog posts, new side projects, even just cleaning up the disastrous mess that is my filing system. But every time I sat down, nothing came out. I’d stare at the screen, or I’d look at the pile of half-done notes, and I’d just feel this heavy inertia. The spark was gone. Vanished. I was just going through the motions, trying to keep the lights on.
The Ace Showed Up and Kicked Me
So, one miserable Tuesday morning, I decided to do a quick check-in reading, just for myself, asking, “What do I need to do to just start moving again?” I wasn’t expecting anything profound, just maybe a Ten of Swords telling me I was overthinking it, or a Four of Swords saying, “Sleep more, dummy.”
Nope. I pulled the Ace of Wands. Right there, staring me down. Big, fiery stick, a cloud, a hand reaching out. It wasn’t subtle. And as advice, it’s brutal in its simplicity. It means: Stop planning. Stop debating the perfect starting point. Stop waiting for the stars to align. You’ve got the initial burst, the seed, the raw, chaotic energy. Now, grab the damn stick and light the fire. You don’t need the whole map; you just need the first step.
I sat there for twenty minutes, trying to talk myself out of it. “Oh, it means I need to start a whole new business venture,” I rationalized. “I need a massive, life-altering change.” Total B.S. I knew exactly what it was saying. It was yelling at me to translate that initial want into a tangible do—no matter how small or stupid.
From Zero to Sawdust: My Practice Record
The project I’d been avoiding for ages was ridiculously simple, yet totally necessary for my workflow: building a proper custom-sized writing surface for my corner desk. My old setup was a hack job of two different tables cobbled together, wobbling every time I typed. Pure chaos. For two years, I’d been collecting Pinterest boards full of plans, buying tiny tools, and then just leaving them in the garage.
The Ace of Wands hit me like a shot of adrenaline. I threw on my hoodie, stomped out to the hardware store before I could talk myself out of it. I didn’t have the blueprints. I didn’t even have the right measurements written down. I just went.
Here’s the breakdown of how that glorious, messy energy unfolded:
- The Initial Rush (The True Ace Moment): I marched into the store and just bought the biggest slab of butcher block countertop they had. Didn’t measure the car. Didn’t check the weight. Just paid for it, and then wrestled it into the back of my small sedan, scraping the paint and nearly snapping my lower back. That was the first action. Stupid, brute force action.
- The Immediate Chaos (The Wands’ Warning): Got it home, realized my cheap little electric saw couldn’t handle the thickness. Tried anyway. The cut was crooked. The blade kept binding. I ripped the edges, splintered the wood, and basically made a mess of the first three hours. I shouted at the wood. I swore at the cheap clamps. I wanted to just carry the whole thing back out to the curb and call it a day. This is where most people quit the Ace of Wands energy—when the initial inspiration meets the reality of the work.
- Pushing Through the Ugliness: I stopped yelling. I grabbed my phone and found a neighbor with a better saw and asked if I could borrow it. Humiliating, but necessary. I had to swallow my pride and get help. I measured again, marked the lines with a pencil, and cut the massive piece down to size. It took three days of sanding, staining, and finishing. My fingers were blistered. My garage was covered in a thick layer of fine, golden dust. I went to bed exhausted, but not burnt out—I was tired from working, which is a totally different kind of tired.
The Real Unlock
The physical desk surface itself? It’s not perfect. There’s a slightly wobbly edge, and if you look close, you can see where I messed up the stain on one corner. But man, it’s mine. I made it. When I finally dragged it up into the office and set up my computer and keyboard on it, everything felt different.
The Ace of Wands wasn’t about the desk. It was about re-activating the part of my brain that knew how to make something from nothing. It proved that if I could push through the initial resistance—the fear, the planning paralysis, the crooked cuts—on a simple woodworking project, I could do it on the messy first draft of a blog post, or the complex outline of a new e-book.
The takeaway is this: The Ace of Wands as advice is just a command to break inertia. It’s the universe telling you to stop sitting on that brilliant idea and just start digging the first hole. You’re going to get dirty. You’re going to mess up the first cut. You’re going to use the wrong tool. But the moment you grab hold and start moving, that passionate energy that was stuck in neutral finally gets deployed. That’s how you truly unlock your creative energy. You don’t wait for permission; you just start sawing.
