The Five of Disks: The Space Between What Was and What Comes Next

What if the pause is not evidence that we are lost, but an opportunity to notice how far we have already traveled?

We have arrived at the Five.

Within the Minor Arcana, the Fives often represent disruption. Something shifts. The stability we worked so carefully to establish begins to feel less certain. What held us yesterday may suddenly feel inadequate for wherever we are going tomorrow.

For Stix & Stone Golf, the journey through the Pentacles has been an exploration of foundation. The Ace offered possibility. The Two taught us to move with change. The Three showed us what becomes possible through collaboration. The Four asked us to establish our footing and recognize the power accumulating through small, intentional movements.

And now the Five asks us to stop.

Not quit. Not retreat. Simply stop.

Because sometimes we become so focused on becoming that we forget to notice what has already become.

I have spent a lot of time lately thinking about transition. Transition in golf. Transition in business. Transition in identity. Transition in the strange and beautiful process of becoming Xzra.

We often imagine transition as movement between two clearly defined places: I was there, and now I am going here. But lived transition rarely feels that clean. Sometimes there is a stretch where the old language no longer fits and the new language has not fully settled into the body. Something has ended. Something else is emerging. For a moment, we exist somewhere between the two.

I have begun thinking about this space through what I call a philosophy of non-being.

Non-being does not have to mean nothingness. Instead, it might describe the release of our need to immediately define what something is. It is the pause before naming, the space between movements, the silence between notes. It is that peculiar moment in a golf swing when the backswing has ended but the downswing has not quite begun.

There is no need to rush through that moment. In fact, rushing through it may be precisely what keeps us from hearing what it has to teach us.

Self-doubt has an interesting relationship with these spaces. When the familiar disappears, doubt often rushes in to fill the vacancy.

Did I make the right choice? Am I actually capable of this? Does this still belong to me? Have I built enough? Am I enough to hold what I have built?

Those questions can make us want to become smaller.

I see this in golf all the time. A player becomes uncertain and begins protecting against the possibility of failure. The swing gets shorter. The body gets tighter. Rotation disappears. Athleticism gives way to control. We try so hard not to make a mistake that we remove the very space required to create power.

What does worry convince us to make smaller?

Sometimes our swing. Sometimes our dreams. Sometimes our identity. Sometimes our willingness to occupy the space we have already worked so hard to create.

The Five of Disks asks us to notice that contraction without immediately judging it. Self-doubt is not necessarily evidence that our foundation has failed. Sometimes it is simply what happens when our awareness expands faster than our confidence. The intellect may arrive at acceptance before the rest of the person does. We may understand who we are becoming before our bodies feel completely comfortable being that person. We may build something beautiful before believing we deserve to stand inside it.

Stix & Stone exists. Students arrive. Community gathers. Ideas become programs. Programs become relationships. Relationships create new possibilities. A name that once existed privately is spoken aloud. A person who once wondered whether there was room for her begins creating that room for others.

And still, doubt asks: But is any of this real yet?

Perhaps that is one of the lessons waiting within the Five. Our internal sense of becoming does not always move at the same speed as the evidence around us. We may still feel like we are becoming someone whom other people can already see. That does not make the uncertainty false, but it does not make the foundation false either.

Both can exist.

Mycelium does much of its work where we cannot see it. Beneath the surface, networks form. Nutrients move. Relationships develop. What appears empty may actually contain an extraordinary amount of activity.

There is something comforting about that image during periods of transition.

We live within systems that often ask becoming to be visible. Produce something. Announce something. Define yourself. Grow. Launch. Perform. Prove. Yet not every meaningful transformation happens above ground. Sometimes the most important work is integration.

Create. Observe. Interpret. Integrate. Revise. Begin again.

That process has become increasingly important to how I understand Stix & Stone, my transition, and even my relationship with golf. Growth is not simply forward movement. Sometimes growth means allowing experience to move through us long enough to become understanding, and sometimes understanding asks us to stop moving.

Golf gives us an unusual laboratory for practicing this.

Between shots, nothing is technically happening, and yet everything is happening. We are walking, breathing, remembering, anticipating, feeling. We are interpreting the previous shot while imagining the next one. A round of golf contains far more non-hitting than hitting.

Perhaps mastery, then, is not only about what we do when it is time to swing. It is also about how we inhabit the spaces where there is nothing to perform.

Can we walk without rehearsing the mistake? Can we stand over a shot without demanding certainty? Can we allow ourselves to arrive? Can we let the next movement emerge instead of forcing it into existence?

There is a tiny moment at the top of the golf swing where direction changes. Backswing becomes downswing. Potential becomes action. But there is no need to manufacture that transition. The club arrives. Gravity participates. The body responds.

And we begin again.

Perhaps this is where the Five of Disks differs from the cards that came before it. The Five does not necessarily give us another brick for the foundation. Sometimes it asks us to sit on the foundation we have already built. To look around. To notice the distance traveled. To grieve what could not come with us and appreciate what did. To question what we still need and perhaps leave some space intentionally empty.

There can be tremendous pressure during transition to explain ourselves—to turn becoming into a coherent narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. But maybe we are allowed to be unfinished. Maybe understanding something beautifully does not mean we have finished experiencing it.

Maybe identity is not something waiting at the end of the path to be discovered.

Maybe it emerges relationally through attention, experience, experimentation, reflection, and choice. Not a fixed destination, but a co-creation. A conversation between who we have been, what we are experiencing, and what we are willing to become.

So here we are at the Five.

Not at the beginning. Not at the destination. Somewhere wonderfully uncomfortable between the two.

There is self-doubt here. There is grief here. There is uncertainty here.

But there is also evidence.

Roots, relationships, skills, stories, names, scars, joy. A body learning new ways to occupy space. A golf swing learning that power sometimes requires becoming wider rather than smaller. A business discovering that its foundation was never meant to become a fortress. A person learning that pausing does not mean disappearing.

Perhaps non-being is not the opposite of becoming.

Perhaps it is part of becoming.

It is the quiet place where we stop trying to produce the next version of ourselves long enough to recognize the person who has already arrived.

The Five of Disks does not ask us to know exactly what comes next. For now, perhaps it is enough to look beneath our feet.

The foundation is still there.

We are standing on it.

And when movement returns, we will have the opportunity to choose what we carry forward.

Attention, not tension. Arrive. Notice. Integrate. And when the time comes, begin again.

For the magic of the game.

— XzraStix & Stone Golf