April Fools
On The Fool from tarot, the spirit of April 1st, and why beginning with nothing might be the most powerful move.
It’s April 1st, and I’ve been thinking about fools.
Most people hear “fool” and think of someone who doesn’t know any better, someone naive, reckless, or just not paying attention. April Fools’ Day reinforces this. It’s the one day a year we celebrate tricking people who weren’t sharp enough to see it coming. But I think there’s something older and stranger underneath the pranks, and it’s been on my mind today.
April 1st, The Inversion
The origins of April Fools’ Day are debated. Some trace it to the French calendar reform of 1582, when New Year’s moved from late March to January 1st and people who still celebrated in spring were mocked as fools. Others point to Roman festivals like Hilaria, or to the medieval Feast of Fools, where social hierarchies were deliberately reversed for a day, servants became masters, a boy bishop presided over church services, rules were suspended.
The specific history matters less than the pattern. Across centuries and cultures, the first of April carries the same theme: inversion of the normal order.
I think the Feast of Fools gets at something important. A society that can’t laugh at its own structures becomes brittle. The point wasn’t chaos for its own sake, it was a kind of pressure release. A reminder that the rules, the hierarchies, the roles we all play are constructions. Useful ones, maybe necessary ones, but not permanent and not beyond questioning.
The modern version, pranks, jokes, gotcha moments, is a diluted form of the same impulse. We trick each other not out of cruelty but out of a shared need to puncture the seriousness for a day. To remind the Monday-through-Friday world that it is, at some level, a performance we’ve all agreed to participate in.
That idea, the fool as the one who sees through the performance, shows up in a lot of places. But the version I keep coming back to lives in a tarot deck.
The Fool, Card Zero
In a tarot deck, The Fool is the only card in the Major Arcana without a number. Sometimes it’s labeled zero, sometimes it’s left blank. The image is distinctive: a young figure standing at the edge of a cliff, looking up at the sky, carrying almost nothing, a small bindle over his shoulder, a white rose, a little dog at his heels. The sun is shining. He’s smiling.
The first thing you notice when you actually look at the card is how happy he is. There’s a lightness to him that none of the other cards carry. The Emperor is locked to his throne. The Hermit is fixed with his lantern. The Hanged Man is literally suspended upside down. Everyone else in the Major Arcana is defined by their position, weighted by it. The Fool is the only one who looks like he’s actually going somewhere, and enjoying the walk.
Yes, there’s a cliff. You can read it as a warning if you want to, and on some level it is one, the world does have edges. But that’s not the card’s primary energy. The cliff is a minor note inside a major key. The deeper meaning is in the details he carries with him. The white rose, innocence and desire without attachment, something delicate he holds without worrying about protecting. The bindle, everything he needs, nothing more. The dog at his heels, instinct, loyalty, something that follows him not because he earned it but because it’s part of him. This is a picture of someone who is genuinely free. Maybe reckless, maybe naive, but free.
The Fool is card zero, not card one. He exists before the journey begins. He hasn’t committed to anything yet. He hasn’t chosen a path, adopted a role, or accumulated the kind of knowledge that makes you cautious. He’s not ignorant in the pejorative sense. He’s unburdened. There’s a difference. And you can see it in his expression, this isn’t someone bracing for impact. It’s someone delighted by what’s ahead.
That’s why The Fool is traditionally the card of infinite potential and new beginnings. Zero isn’t empty, it’s open. Every path is still available. Every version of the journey is still possible. The other cards each represent something specific, a fixed stage of experience. The Fool represents the moment before all of that, when nothing has been narrowed yet. It’s the most possibility you’ll ever hold at once.
There’s a kinship between this and the spirit of April 1st. Both versions of the fool expose the same thing: the absurdity of rigid certainty. The tarot Fool walks past every structured role in the deck and isn’t bound by any of them. The April Fool flips the hierarchy and proves it survives the disruption. In both cases, the fool isn’t the person who doesn’t know, it’s the person who isn’t afraid to look like they don’t know.
The Cliff
The cliff gets all the attention when people talk about this card, but I think that says more about us than about The Fool. We see the edge and assume the card is about the edge. Meanwhile he’s looking at the sky.
That said, the cliff is real, and he sees it. He just isn’t organized around it. And I think that distinction matters, because there’s a version of risk assessment that looks responsible but is actually just avoidance wearing a thoughtful mask. You study the cliff, measure it, model what might happen if you fall, talk to people who’ve fallen, read books about cliffs. And at the end of all that research, you’re still standing at the top, no closer to moving than when you started. But now you feel productive about it, which is almost worse.
I’ve done this. More than once. I’ve mistaken preparation for progress, convinced myself that one more piece of information would unlock the confidence to move. It never does. At some point you either step or you don’t.
The Fool doesn’t need a complete plan. He needs a direction. And I’ve found that most of the meaningful things I’ve been part of started the same way. The project I wasn’t ready for. The conversation I wasn’t ready to have. None of them started with certainty. They started with something closer to a decision that the cost of standing still was higher than the cost of getting it wrong.
That’s not recklessness. That’s a different kind of math.
Holy Fools
The fool as an archetype runs deeper than tarot or April pranks. It shows up across civilizations in ways I find genuinely fascinating.
In Russian Orthodox tradition, the yurodivy, the holy fool, deliberately feigns madness or simplicity. He lives in poverty, says outrageous things, and refuses to play by social rules. But he’s considered closer to God than anyone else, precisely because he’s abandoned worldly ego. He has nothing to protect. No reputation to maintain. No position to defend. And because of that, he can say what no one else will say. He speaks truth to power not because he’s brave in the conventional sense, but because he’s free in a way that the powerful can’t be.
In mythology, the trickster plays a similar role, Coyote in Native American traditions, Loki in Norse myth, Hermes in Greek, Anansi in West African folklore. The trickster breaks rules not to destroy, but to create new possibilities. He introduces chaos into systems that have become too rigid, and something better emerges from the disruption.
Shakespeare understood this. In King Lear, the court jester is the only character who tells Lear the truth, that he’s made a catastrophic mistake, that his daughters are lying to him, that his world is collapsing. Everyone else flatters or schemes. The Fool just says it. He’s protected by his apparent harmlessness. Nobody fears the fool, nobody suppresses the fool, and that’s exactly what gives him freedom that everyone else has traded away for status.
The pattern across all of these is consistent: the person with nothing to lose sees more clearly than the person with everything to protect. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
Beginner’s Mind
Zen Buddhism has a concept that maps directly to what The Fool carries: shoshin, or beginner’s mind.
Shunryu Suzuki, the monk who brought Zen practice to America, put it simply: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.”
I’ve found this to be true in ways that are sometimes uncomfortable to admit. Expertise is obviously necessary, no one wants a surgeon who’s figuring it out as he goes. But expertise calcifies. The more you know about how something works, the harder it becomes to imagine it working differently. You internalize the constraints so deeply that they stop feeling like constraints and start feeling like reality.
The most dangerous person in a room isn’t the one who knows nothing. It’s the one who knows just enough to be certain. Certainty closes doors. The beginner, by carrying no certainty, carries the most possibility.
This is why outsiders so often see what insiders miss. They ask the question everyone else is too experienced to ask: Why do we do it this way? The expert hears that question and thinks it’s naive. But sometimes it’s the most important question in the room, and the only reason nobody asked it sooner is that everyone assumed someone else already had the answer.
The Fool’s Journey
In tarot, there’s a framework called The Fool’s Journey. It maps the 22 cards of the Major Arcana as a single narrative, the story of a life from beginning to completion.
The Fool starts at zero and encounters every archetype along the way. The Magician, raw creative power. The High Priestess, intuition. The Emperor, authority and structure. On through the deck, each card representing a stage of experience.
What I find compelling about this framework is that The Fool doesn’t get to skip the difficult cards. He meets The Tower, catastrophe, the moment everything you’ve built comes apart. He meets Death, not literal, but transformation so complete that what you were ceases to exist. He meets The Devil, the chains you put on yourself and then blame on someone else.
He walks through all of it. Not because he’s tough or enlightened, but because he started walking and the path goes through everything. That’s the deal. You don’t get to pick which experiences you’ll have. You only get to decide whether you’ll start.
The final card is The World, completion, integration, the moment where everything you’ve experienced becomes a coherent whole. But you can’t get there without going through The Tower first. You can’t reach card 21 without being willing to start as card zero.
I think most people intuitively understand this. They just hope there’s a shortcut. In my experience, there isn’t.
Being the Fool
We live in a world that rewards credentials and certainty. Your LinkedIn profile is a monument to things you’ve already accomplished. Your resume is a curated list of positions already held. The entire professional apparatus is designed to prove that you know what you’re doing, that you are, above all, not a fool.
And yet every company that changed something was started by someone who looked foolish at the time. Every career pivot that worked required a period of looking like you had no idea what you were doing. Every honest conversation that actually strengthened a relationship started with someone saying the thing they weren’t supposed to say.
I don’t think The Fool is naive. I think he’s courageous enough to begin before he’s ready. And I think there’s a meaningful difference between ignorance and willingness. Ignorance doesn’t know the risk. Willingness knows the risk and steps forward anyway, not because the risk doesn’t matter, but because standing still has a cost too. It’s just a quieter cost. One that compounds over years until you realize you’ve spent a long time preparing for something you never actually did.
But here’s the thing I keep coming back to: The Fool isn’t gritting his teeth. He’s not white-knuckling his way past the cliff. He’s joyful. The card’s energy isn’t endurance in the face of danger, it’s delight at the open road. The danger is real and acknowledged, but it’s not the story. The story is that beginning something, truly beginning, before you’ve armored yourself with plans and credentials and exit strategies, feels like sunlight. It feels like possibility. It feels like being alive in a way that standing still never does.
April 1st seems like a reasonable day to remember that. Not in some dramatic, quit-your-job way. But in the honest, private way where you admit to yourself that somewhere in your life there’s a beginning you’ve been postponing until conditions are perfect. Conditions are never perfect. I’ve never once seen perfect conditions. The Fool figured that out early, which might be why he’s the one who’s smiling.
William Blake put it better than I can: “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.”