Tarot contributor Jessica explains how to draw a card to guide you in the New Year - and unpacks the meaning of The Fool.

On New Year’s Eve, my friend Catherine, looking for a card to tell her what she might expect in 2020, drew The Fool. She was psyched. “This is a good card for beginnings—adventurous and optimistic,” she wrote in her journal. She also mentioned a phrase that Arthur Edward Waite—the Waite in Smith-Waite—used to describe The Fool: “A spirit in search of experience.”

Many of us set intentions for bettering ourselves when a fresh year begins, but we often make these plans from a place of shame and dissatisfaction. We start new diets and exercise regimens not because we want to feel better mentally and physically, but because our culture benefits from telling us that we’re too fat. We tell ourselves we’re sticking to a budget not because we’ve figured out that thoughtless consumption is not the key to happiness—or good for the environment—but because we’re terrified to even look at our credit card balances after the excesses of holidays. Even goals like finishing that novel or starting a garden are often grounded in a self-inflicted sense of guilt about accomplishments we feel we should have completed by now.