Upright the Six of Cups is read as nostalgia, innocence and simple affection recalled; reversed, as an inability to leave the past, comfort sought in what is already gone rather than in what is present.
Waite's printed meaning stresses the past directly, memories, childhood associations, things that belong to yesterday, and gives little sense of the card as a caution; the warning against dwelling in the past that most contemporary readers now attach to the upright card is largely a later addition, one that grew alongside a broader twentieth-century reading culture more interested in psychological growth than Waite's own generation was. Read strictly from his 1910 text, the Six of Cups is closer to a simple, warm memory than to a diagnosis of avoidance.
The card is also one of several in the deck commonly given to questions about children, family of origin or early relationships specifically, on the reasoning that its central figures are themselves children; this narrower, more literal reading sits alongside the broader nostalgia reading without replacing it, and which one a given reader reaches for often depends on the question asked rather than on any rule fixed by the tradition.
Reversed, most modern practice reads the card as an invitation to notice when comfort in the past has started to substitute for living in the present, a reading closer to twentieth-century therapeutic language than to Waite's own more modest description of the upright card.