The Lesson of The Tower: Embracing Life’s Scariest Changes
Ah, The Tower. No other card in the Tarot is capable of inciting such a visceral reaction when it comes up in a reading. Your stomach lurches, your butt puckers, your pulse quickens, and your palms moisten with sweat. Why? Because the most basic interpretation of The Tower is dramatic, unexpected change — chaos, upheaval, and massive breakdowns are often on the way when we see this card. In fact, it is one of the cards I have always feared most in my own readings. Even the artwork in the classic Rider-Waite Tarot is pretty daunting:
The Changes We Fear Most
The Tower represents the moment after which things can never ever be the same. It immediately jolts us into a new reality.
The Tower is that day when everything was perfectly normal, until you got the phone call that made time stop. It’s showing up for your weekly 1–1 with your boss and learning your position is being eliminated. It’s coming home midday and catching your partner cheating. It’s the morning I awoke to a string of midnight missed calls from my ex, and soon learned that the teenager we’d been raising as our “bonus daughter” had been killed in a horrific car accident the night before. The Tower represents the moment after which things can never ever be the same. It immediately jolts us into a new reality.
So it’s pretty easy to understand why this card tends to strike fear and incite panic in the hearts of most who encounter it, right? As a general rule, we HATE change — especially dramatic, unexpected, disruptive change — the kind of change that forces us to change along with it. But the thing is… this kind of change tends to come along just exactly when we need it — regardless of whether we want it or feel ready for it. And that’s honestly part of the beauty of it, I think. Why?
Comfortable Misery
The energy of The Tower forces us out of those ruts — it sets us free, ready or not.
In my experience at least, Tower-esque events tend to occur when I am locked into some kind of “comfortable misery” — a situation that isn’t making me happy but that I am unwilling to change for whatever reason (and we can always find reasons/excuses to stay miserable, can’t we?). After all, comfortable misery is just that — comfortable. It’s why we stay in unsatisfying relationships and shitty jobs. Because they are familiar, and we know how to navigate them, even if they don’t serve our highest good. Perhaps because we are afraid of ending up with something worse. But the energy of The Tower forces us out of those ruts — it sets us free, ready or not. And as it turns out, I tend to look back on most of the Tower events in my life to find that each has been at the heart of some kind of very necessary personal change and/or growth for me — change and growth that would not have occurred had my entire life not been turned upside down by whatever chaos and destruction was at hand at the time.
For example: One very normal Wednesday evening, I came home from a typical day at work and my then-fiancee completely blindsided me with a breakup, just a few short weeks before our wedding was scheduled to occur. I was utterly shattered. I had built much of my identity and based almost all of my happiness on being with her, being part of her family, and the future we had planned together. But she was also abusive. We fought constantly. I lied and hid things from her. Our relationship was undeniably toxic. And yet I would not have left her voluntarily. I would have married her. Why? Comfortable misery. I loved her family. We were raising an amazing teenager together. Her job enabled us to live well and for me to attend grad school full time. We were planning a huge wedding that was only a month away. No way was I willing to destroy all of that. Even if I was super unhappy most of the time, I knew how to navigate the situation — I knew the rules. It was familiar. It was comfortable. I could find pockets of happiness here and there. Change and the prospect of starting over was too scary — I didn’t think I could do any better anyway. But the change was desperately needed. And as utterly unprepared as I felt for it, it came anyway.
Emerging From the Rubble
This kind of destruction also brings with it the blessing of an opportunity to rebuild — to begin anew. To salvage what we can and start over.
It has taken me a long time to heal and rebuild from that experience, and sometimes pain from those old wounds still bubbles up in weird and unexpected ways, but I can honestly say that it was one of the most meaningful and growth-inducing experiences of my life. In hindsight, I am actually incredibly grateful that it happened. Without that experience and the changes it forced me to make in my life, I would not have been able to have a healthy relationship with the incredible human I met a couple years later and am now lucky enough to call my wife. We often lament that we didn’t find each other ten years sooner, but we also both acknowledge that without the Tower-esque relationship experiences we both have had and learned from in that time, what we have now just wouldn’t be possible for either of us.
When it seems like the whole world is crashing down around us, it’s easy to focus on the loss, the chaos, and the complete upheaval of our established ways of living and of looking at things. But what we often forget to consider (or maybe are unable to consider in the heat of a Tower experience), is that this kind of destruction also brings with it the blessing of an opportunity to rebuild — to begin anew. To salvage what we can and start over. Yes, this is often incredibly hard work, and we may not always feel we have the strength to even begin to pick up the pieces, but this is yet another lesson The Tower can teach us — a lesson about our own resilience.
We Can Do Hard Things
Each time I have been crushed, and each time I have come back a little stronger, with new skills and new understandings that I didn’t have before.
As one of my favorite authors and inspirations, Glennon Doyle, likes to say — “we can do hard things!”And we can. After all, each of us has survived 100% of our worst days thus far. Until that aforementioned breakup, I had never experienced something so painful and disruptive to my life. But almost a year to the day later came those fateful missed calls from my ex, and the news that our sweet Taylor was gone forever at only 17 years old. Four months after that, I lost my beloved grandfather. Then my career fell apart. Each time I have been crushed, and each time I have come back a little stronger, with new skills and new understandings that I didn’t have before. It’s never easy to cope when life throws you a massive curve ball, and I have certainly required a lot of support (and therapy) to heal from these things as they have happened, but I have healed. I have integrated what I have learned. I have become more resilient, and I have become more me.
Don’t Fear The Reaper
“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.”
And you know what? I am starting to fear The Tower a little less these days. Am I ever excited to see it in a reading? No way. But now, instead of panicking, I try to get out ahead of it. I ask myself where change might be needed in my life — where I might be keeping myself stuck in comfortable misery. I look for the structures in my life that are not serving my highest good, and where possible, I try to start the demolition myself. Sometimes all I can do is batten down the hatches and prepare for the storm. When I’m lucky and I am paying attention to my intuition, I can actually avert disaster now and then. The key to all of this lies in knowing that life will continue to throw these catastrophic events at us, no matter what kind of walls we build to protect ourselves. Sometimes we can see it coming, and other times it takes us by complete surprise. And while I mostly want to punch people in the face who say “everything happens for a reason,” the maxim is not entirely without value — we really can find meaning and growth in almost anything that happens to us, and there is something to be said for the opportunity to start again, with more experience this time.
So the next time you find yourself standing face to face with The Tower, whether in a reading or in real life, know that when the chaos subsides and the dust begins to settle you can rebuild. Again and again if necessary, and a little bit better each time. After all, as Buddhist nun Pema Chodron so eloquently puts it in her book When Things Fall Apart (essential reading when you’re feeling beaten down by the energy of The Tower in your life, btw): “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.”