One of the first things we lose as adults is spontaneity. And with it, something even more subtle: permission.
Permission to begin before we feel ready.
To change our minds.
To look ridiculous.
To disappoint expectations.
To become someone our past would not recognize.
Nobody takes it away from us, we slowly hand it over: to school, to work, to success, to others’ opinions and to the identity we spend years building.
And the more competent we become, the more expensive that identity becomes. Because competence has a hidden side effect: it quietly teaches us to avoid uncertainty.
Little by little, we begin to believe that if we analyse enough, prepare enough and control enough, we will never have to step into the unknown.
So we become excellent at repeating what has already worked, we refine, optimize, perfect. And we stop daring to begin.
This is where The Fool enters the story.
Not as a Tarot card, but as a human function: the part of us that remembers that life has never asked us to know everything before taking the first step.
Perhaps that is why The Fool carries the number 0.
Zero does not belong anywhere, which means it belongs everywhere. It can appear at the beginning of a journey, in the middle of a successful career, or at the end of a chapter. It is the possibility of taking a first step again.
The Fool is often described as naïve and too prone to risk, but I believe that misses the point: naivety can be the absence of awareness but the Fool is more the refusal to let awareness become paralysis.
Big difference.
Kings that kept a fool at court did not only seek entertainment, they needed someone reminding them that power always carries the same risk: believing it can see everything.
And the fool was there to interrupt certainty, expose blind spots and ask the question nobody else dared to ask.
This is why this archetype still matters: not because it tells us to become reckless but because it reminds us that curiosity, spontaneity and freedom are not the opposite of competence. It’s what keeps competence alive.
So here is today’s mirror:
What have you stopped doing because you no longer feel allowed to be a beginner?
Where has competence quietly become a prison instead of a resource?
Where have you confused certainty with safety?
And what part of you is still waiting for permission that nobody was ever supposed to give?
This is #TheFoolsBriefing (1/78)
See you in the next mirror.