reflecting on the week: how to approach a maze

So I decided to do a quick little draw with the question/theme of something for me to reflect on about this past week...

So yeah, Hermit and 3 of swords here. The young fey man, blue-skinned and sad, stands alone in the water, the turbulent waves, the red-tinged and dark cloudy sky. Wind, cold wind it looks like, blows at him, his wings and his hair. It looks pretty uncomfortable there actually, the cold air and water, but the man looks too distressed to really care. That bright red sword, pointing downwards on his chest; something weighing so heavily on his mind that physical discomfort seems utterly irrelevant.

The lonely quality to the card. And of course that's only emphasized by the Hermit next to him. The Hermit, making his way along in the stairwell maze that looks like something out of Alice in Wonderland. He has a torch to illuminate his wave, awareness of his situation, maybe even a pretty good idea of where he is going, and yet....just LOOK at the crazy way those stairwells wind and twist about. How is he supposed to know which stair to take, and when, and for how long? He looks pretty damned confused, this Hermit, and who wouldn't be, trying to navigate through something like that alone? Of course, sometimes a journey like that through the maze can be quite enjoyable, wondering about any which way, seeing interesting things for their own sake. But sometimes, when you really need to get TO or AWAY from something, it's just damned frustrating.

These images do speak quite well to my week. See, love as I do to write and tl;dr all over the internet about whatever, when it comes to my most serious issues I tend to be rather private, secretive. Do not speak of them by name; do not speak of them much if at all even to most close friends. So as a result, I do spend more time than you might think with the blind stumbling about, struggling with things while public laughing smile fine fine. More specifically to the last week, though....well I spent the first half of it dealing with what was a rather frustrating finalized break with  a former therapist...and she refused to refer me to someone new....and when I decided to be proactive and responsible and find someone for myself...no one seems around/available until mid March, and so. These cards kind of describe how I feel about the situation quite aptly: frustration and demoralization because here I am, actually TRYING to make some kind of real effort, and with regards to one particular issue, more of a concrete effort than I have in YEARS and in terms of 'qualified'/'professional' support...it's just not there. And hell if the whole situation doesn't feel just like that impossibly complicated maze sometimes.

But the lesson here, I think is that...well if you let yourself feel so sad and aggrieved and demoralized as that blue fey...of course trying to navigate through that maze, even if you can scrounge up the energy, is going to be a torture. If you keep thinking about whatever it is that made you feel like that 3 of Swords, keep turning it over in your mind, keep bothering yourself with how little concrete progress you are making...it's going to be very lame maze-exploring times indeed. It doesn't have to be though. The whole idea of enjoying the journey. Even if the situation you are trying to get away from is kind of objectively serious/desperate...if your only option at the moment IS confused stumbling, and there is nothing, at the current period of time, that you can do to change that...then let yourself confused stumble. Enjoy the wonder, the little interesting tidbits you can pick up and see in that maze. Let go of the negative and make the best of the situation. See and learn what you can. Do the best that you can. Mindfulness, make the best of the current moment, being fully aware of yourself in the current moment. You might find, when the right time comes to reassess and make some more changes, that you've actually stumbled a bit further in the right direction than you might of expected....