Fortune telling is defined as “the act or practice of predicting the future“. It could not be more simpler than this. All of us will at some point in life would like to have a sneak preview in what are laying ahead for us. There can be people who engage fortune telling for fun or out of curiosity; but there is another group of people who are likely not in good life situations and prying into the future can be the best hope they look forward to. The same hope that we all have is that we look forward to have good fortune. And what is fortune?
Fortune is defined as “the set of good or bad events that happen to you and have an effect on your life“. This is some pretty heavy stuff and it makes fortune telling a lot more on the sombre side. I have observed there are people from offline and online who takes fortune telling lightly. I am not the type that going to treat fortune telling as a type of religious faith to shove it down onto non-believers, if you are not into fortune telling, fine. But what I see these days are people who get their fortunes read by people or group of people, each offering different interpretation of whatever techniques is used. I see this as a problem. This is because even in life analysis type of reading can have different variations of schools grow from the same technique, let alone cartomancy that relies on illustrations that are rich in symbolism. Different fortune teller of different proficiency level can tell you different things or even things that are way off. This is because my take in a fortune telling session is that it is the interaction and dynamics happening between the fortune teller and the querent. So, what is a fortune teller?
Fortune teller is defined as “a person who tells you what that person thinks will happen to you in the future“. The keyword that stands out in the definition is thinks. This refers to how this fortune teller comes to a conclusion when he speaks the future you behold. So how this fortune teller actually comes to a conclusion during a reading? Was the fortune told by using a technique-based method? Or was the fortune told by the intuition of the fortune teller? Or is the fortune teller a psychic to begin with!? All these can be discussed in a future post. These considerations in mind helps reinforce the point I have made in the paragraph before, that a fortune telling session is the interaction and dynamics happening between the fortune teller and the querent.
Going through these thinking helps me rethink what I thought of fortune teller. Despite of societal stereotype, it seems to me fortune telling is a serious profession. A querent’s fortune should always be respected and by means of studied properly before a fortune teller says anything because even uttered in a festive environment, a querent can really take a fortune teller’s words to heart.
For simplicity sake, maybe I just may answer I am a fortune teller, to random people who asks me what am I up to.
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