Everything in this course gets better with a record and worse without one, for a plain reason: memory quietly rewrites readings to match how things turned out.

What to write down

The date. The question as you actually asked it. The cards and their positions. Your reading in a few sentences. And separately, what you expected to happen.

Then leave space. Weeks later, come back and add what did happen.

The gap between those last two entries is the entire value of the journal. It is where you find out that you read Cups too optimistically, or that your sense of timing runs two months early.

What to look for after a few months

• Cards you draw far more often than chance allows — usually a question you keep asking sideways.
• Cards you always read the same way, which means you have one meaning where the card has five.
• Questions you re-asked, and what mood you were in each time.
• Readings you were sure about and got wrong. Worth more than the ones you got right.

Where to go from here

Keep drawing a daily card. Read the card pages for the cards that keep turning up, not the ones you find pretty. Take the quiz when recall feels slow, and practise spreads when the meanings are solid but the assembly is not. Those are different problems and they need different exercises.

And re-read lesson 13 in six months. The four-pass method reads very differently once you have a few hundred readings behind you, and the parts that seemed pedantic turn out to be the parts holding everything up.