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silveradept[This is part of a series exploring the Baseball Tarot. If you would like to prompt for a part of the game or a card from the deck, all the rest of the month is available for your curiosity, about either baseball or Tarot. Leave a comment with a prompt if you want in. All other comments are still welcome, of course.]
...the Goat. Because baseball is a game of opposed sides, there will always be someone who wins the game for their side and someone who loses it for theirs. That said, the Goat label is usually only applied in situations where the loss ends up being particularly dramatic - an error on a ground ball that lets in the winning run, a wild pitch or a breaking ball that doesn't that produces a loss, or the worst Goat of all, striking out to end the game with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth. Really, the only thing that separates the Hero and the Goat is which team wins the game from the play.
Like Hero status, being a Goat is a temporary situation for most people. Lost this one, go out and win the next one. There will be more games to play. Except that the human condition is really good at ignoring the good things, or discounting their frequency, importance, or impact. Those socialized into roles that say "no, you do not talk about your accomplishments", with the moniker "uppity" that is applied to those who buck this trend, are even more quick to dismiss the things that they have done that are truly good things.
With the good things discounted and minimized, the only things left to fill the void are the bad things, which start to take on outsize importance in the psyche. They can blunt the power of the good things that then happen later, and the small bad things start to snowball all together to become big and mean. If this sounds like the beginning of depression, you've got the idea. Call it a slump, the yips, the mental game, being stuck in your own head, whatever you like, being the Goat takes a psychological toll that tests the resilience of any player. Sometimes a player has coaches that can help them collect perspective and shake it off. (And sometimes, yes, Taylor Swift is filling the role of that coach.) Every now and then, though, the person who is supposed to be the coach is the person contributing to this problem - if you've got a coach (or teammate) that's more interested in assigning blame than helping you make your game better, it can be really easy to feel like you're always going to be the Goat. The ideal would be to go to another team somewhere, but that's not always an option for everyone.
This card, and the Rider-Waite Tarot equivalent, The Devil, are both kind of bleak cards to get, should they show up in your reading. They're pretty clearly indicating that failure, possibly even spectacular failure, is in your future, and odds are good that you're going to be at least partially responsible for it. This sucks.
The thing to remember, though, is that this is supposed to be a temporary setback, instead of a permanent issue or some form of commentary about who you are as a person at your core. Unlike stories where misfortune is always concentrated on one person (usually for a nefarious purpose), out here people usually don't have those kinds of failures all in a row unless they've engineered them to happen this way through their deliberate actions (and at that point, the multinational usually takes a bankruptcy, a bailout, and then goes right back to setting the dominoes back up in exactly the same configuration again). These kinds of cascades often happen if you've been trying to set yourself up as the Hero at the expense of others. Not only do others start to conspire against you, but keeping all the effort going starts to become akin to juggling chainsaws, with the same amount of potential damage when one gets dropped or specifically interfered with by someone else.
It's part of our nature to see the bad things more easily than the good, and to believe the bad things happen more often and are worse than the good. If you end up being the Goat, this too shall pass. And if you can actually believe that thoroughly enough that it does just pass, you are going to be very happy in life.
Just saying.
...the Goat. Because baseball is a game of opposed sides, there will always be someone who wins the game for their side and someone who loses it for theirs. That said, the Goat label is usually only applied in situations where the loss ends up being particularly dramatic - an error on a ground ball that lets in the winning run, a wild pitch or a breaking ball that doesn't that produces a loss, or the worst Goat of all, striking out to end the game with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth. Really, the only thing that separates the Hero and the Goat is which team wins the game from the play.
Like Hero status, being a Goat is a temporary situation for most people. Lost this one, go out and win the next one. There will be more games to play. Except that the human condition is really good at ignoring the good things, or discounting their frequency, importance, or impact. Those socialized into roles that say "no, you do not talk about your accomplishments", with the moniker "uppity" that is applied to those who buck this trend, are even more quick to dismiss the things that they have done that are truly good things.
With the good things discounted and minimized, the only things left to fill the void are the bad things, which start to take on outsize importance in the psyche. They can blunt the power of the good things that then happen later, and the small bad things start to snowball all together to become big and mean. If this sounds like the beginning of depression, you've got the idea. Call it a slump, the yips, the mental game, being stuck in your own head, whatever you like, being the Goat takes a psychological toll that tests the resilience of any player. Sometimes a player has coaches that can help them collect perspective and shake it off. (And sometimes, yes, Taylor Swift is filling the role of that coach.) Every now and then, though, the person who is supposed to be the coach is the person contributing to this problem - if you've got a coach (or teammate) that's more interested in assigning blame than helping you make your game better, it can be really easy to feel like you're always going to be the Goat. The ideal would be to go to another team somewhere, but that's not always an option for everyone.
This card, and the Rider-Waite Tarot equivalent, The Devil, are both kind of bleak cards to get, should they show up in your reading. They're pretty clearly indicating that failure, possibly even spectacular failure, is in your future, and odds are good that you're going to be at least partially responsible for it. This sucks.
The thing to remember, though, is that this is supposed to be a temporary setback, instead of a permanent issue or some form of commentary about who you are as a person at your core. Unlike stories where misfortune is always concentrated on one person (usually for a nefarious purpose), out here people usually don't have those kinds of failures all in a row unless they've engineered them to happen this way through their deliberate actions (and at that point, the multinational usually takes a bankruptcy, a bailout, and then goes right back to setting the dominoes back up in exactly the same configuration again). These kinds of cascades often happen if you've been trying to set yourself up as the Hero at the expense of others. Not only do others start to conspire against you, but keeping all the effort going starts to become akin to juggling chainsaws, with the same amount of potential damage when one gets dropped or specifically interfered with by someone else.
It's part of our nature to see the bad things more easily than the good, and to believe the bad things happen more often and are worse than the good. If you end up being the Goat, this too shall pass. And if you can actually believe that thoroughly enough that it does just pass, you are going to be very happy in life.
Just saying.
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Date: 2015-12-07 04:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-07 04:37 pm (UTC)