On
this April Fool's Day, instead of pulling cheap jokes to fool our
friends, why not remember the role played by the Fool in the Tarot deck? There -- as in this example from the famous Rider-Waite deck -- the Fool is depicted as a vagabond, a fanciful adventurer, less brave than innocently unaware; he seems to know nothing of the world, yet he's out there meeting it head-first, taking risks, ready to step off a precipice as if onto an invisible stairway to Heaven, as the little dog of rational thought yaps and nips at his ankles.
I'd like to reclaim this day for the heroic principle of the Fool, so that it's less an opportunity to mock others than to throw off our shackles of routine and do something foolish ourselves; something that might take us a bit outside our usual comfort zone toward something, anything, that we might look back on in days and years to come as something so unlike us and so worth our time.
