As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don’t deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“People always try to seek an answer from the world to comfort themselves,” my psychology teacher once said during an AP Psychology class last year. That sentence stayed with me, and I began to observe the people around me more carefully. I noticed that tarot cards had quietly become a kind of comfort for many of my friends when they were faced with uncertainty.

I cannot say that tarot cards are right or wrong. Yet this human desire to predict the future, to search for certainty in the unknown, gradually made me more and more curious. I began to realise that perhaps what people are truly afraid of is not the future itself, but the uncertainty that comes with it.

So I decided to create my work around the theme of the fear of the unknown, and tarot cards became the medium through which I explored this idea.

The Wheel of Fortune is one of the most symbolic cards in the tarot deck. It represents change, cycles, fate, and the movement of life. Wheel of Fortune often refers to forces beyond our control, or the natural cycles of life.

When I think about my life, I often feel that I have met many different people along the way. Some of them were only passing through my life, yet they became the ones who quietly pushed the wheel of my fortune forward. Perhaps no one stays forever, but every person changes the direction of the wheel in some way.

The wheel is always turning, and nothing stays the same forever. Good times and bad times are both temporary, and my life moves in cycles: success and failure, happiness and sadness, beginnings and endings. Looking back, I realise that what once felt like an ending often became a beginning, and what felt permanent was only temporary after all.

Maybe the Wheel of Fortune does not tell us what will happen in the future. Instead, it reminds us that life is always moving, and we are all simply travelling with the turning of the wheel.

So I was reminded of The Garden of Earthly Delights by Bosch. Our world seemed to begin in beauty and innocence, yet after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, humanity fell, and the garden of paradise slowly turned into hell as the wheel of fate continued to turn.

I sometimes wonder: what would the world have become if they had never eaten the forbidden fruit? And what would have happened if they had recognised their own desires before acting upon them? Perhaps history would have moved in a completely different direction.

It feels as if our own wheel of fortune still exists somewhere unseen, quietly turning. With every decision we make, every desire we follow, and every mistake we commit, the wheel moves a little more, guiding us toward a future we cannot fully predict or understand.

This fear of the unknown, however, is strangely comforted by tarot cards. They seem to offer us a sense of direction, telling us about the rise and fall of fortune, the appearance and disappearance of opportunities. Whether they are true or not, almost does not matter—what matters is that they give us something to hold onto when we are standing in front of the uncertainty of the future.