Knight of Pentacles

All through my school years, particularly in the lead up to my GCSEs, I loved drawing timetables.  Did you ever do that?  I would use a different coloured marker pen for the days, and then different colours again for the subjects.  Sometimes I would carve it up into hourly segments, other times it would simply be blocks of revision time.  Weekends would be particularly intricate (stickers were involved!) and they were basically multi coloured masterpieces.

The thing is, I became so focused on creating The Perfect Timetable, I was forever tweaking it (and with each tweak came a new timetable)  until I probably spent more time planning my GCSE revision than actually doing it!

That's the danger of the Knight of Pentacles.

Because, although all Knights are about action, some react faster than others, and this Knight likes, maybe even enjoys, the preparation - the planning - a little too much.  Such is the need to succeed,  the fear is, nothing short of perfection will do. 

With perfection comes the risk of procrastination though, and I am so guilty of that.  In a bid to be inspired, I have spent hours looking, no, actively searching, for people who might be writing, painting or shooting in interesting ways.  I mean hours.  And these are the same hours I could have been writing, painting and shooting. 

It's a fine line between inspiration and comparison, one being the death knell of creativity.

Pentacles is the suit which represents our earthly existence, our outer self as seen by others, so it can be frightening to let our creative selves be seen without a plan or before we feel it's perfect.  The truth is though, we can never fully plan for the future, and for me, I've yet to write, paint or shoot anything I've thought is perfect.

Lasting success is built on discipline, patience and hard work.  And most of the time we just need to harness the energy of the Knight, find the courage to let go, and hit the publish button.