Four Wands hold up flower garlands, forming a canopy. In the background, people are celebrating. This card refers to the succesful completion of the foundations of a project, achieving a milestone on the road to further development. The canopy of flowers resembles the chuppah under which a Jewish couple is traditionally married, marriage being the official completion of the first stage of a relationship. Sometimes Four of Wands is said to be about reaching a particularly stable, peaceful period in your life where you feel fulfilled and generally happy.

 

Celebrate this stability, but realize that it may lead to complacency. Although a first stage has been completed, the journey itself is still nowhere near finished. It will require ongoing energy investment to develop it further. Indeed, you might find the next step harder to take because motivation to strive for more lacking. How to get out of your comfort zone? This is why challenging gifted youngsters is vital for their development, for instance. It's also why it might not just be a good thing that you feel you're doing 'fine' (at work, in your current lifestyle) - that very satisfaction might be withholding you from doing what you really want, stifling passion and capacity for self-renewal.

 

Complacency can be a threat for individuals, but these ideas are also applicable on entire organizations, and society as a whole. As social science writer John W. Gardner writes:

 

There are kinds of excellence — very important kinds — that are not necessarily associated with the capacity for renewal. A society that has reached heights of excellence may already be caught in the rigidities that will bring it down. An institution may hold itself to the highest standards and yet already be entombed in the complacency that will eventually spell its decline.