What The Fool Knows About Starting Over

Most beginnings in tarot books sound exciting. A new job, a new city, a new love, a blank page. But a lot of the beginnings in real life aren't chosen. They arrive because something else ended. The relationship is over, so you are single again. The job is gone, so you are starting again. The person is gone, so you are learning how to live in a world that has a gap in it.

Those beginnings don't feel like adventures. They feel like standing at the edge of something with no idea what is below.

That is, more or less, exactly where The Fool is standing.

A young man at the edge

On the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith card, The Fool walks along a high ridge with the sky open in front of him. One foot is already near the edge of a cliff. In one hand he holds a white rose. Over his shoulder he carries a small bundle on a stick. A little white dog jumps at his heels. Behind him, the sun is up.

It is easy to read him as careless. He isn't looking down; he seems not to have noticed the drop at all. Even the fortune-telling list in A. E. Waite's own book gives "folly, mania, extravagance". But when Waite, under whose direction Pamela Colman Smith drew the deck, described the picture itself, he saw something else:

The edge which opens on the depth has no terror; it is as if angels were waiting to uphold him, if it came about that he leaped from the height.

The Fool is not unaware of the edge. He is simply not ruled by it.

Zero is not nothing

The Fool's number is zero. Every other card in the Major Arcana has a number from one to twenty-one, a place in the sequence. The Fool stands outside it, or at the very start of it, depending on how you read the deck.

When you are starting over after a loss, zero can feel like the right number. Back to nothing. All that work, all that time, and here you are at the beginning again.

But zero in the tarot is not emptiness. It is the number before counting begins, the place where anything is still possible because nothing has been decided. The Fool's bundle hasn't been unpacked yet. The road hasn't been chosen. That is frightening. For some people, in time, it can also hold a kind of freedom, though it is fine if it doesn't feel that way yet.

What he carries

Look at what The Fool brings with him, because it is very little.

A white rose. Readers usually take it as innocence or pure intention. After a loss, it might be the one thing worth keeping: whatever was good and true in what you had, carried forward without the rest of the weight.

A small bundle. Not a trunk. Not a moving van. Most of what you used to carry can't come with you to the next part of your life, and the card doesn't pretend otherwise. You bring what fits.

A dog. The dog is often read as instinct, or as a loyal companion who warns him of danger. Either way, The Fool is not entirely alone. Most of us aren't, even when it feels that way. There is usually someone, or something, jumping at our heels: a friend who keeps texting, a habit that steadies us, a part of ourselves that wants to keep going.

The sun behind him

Then there is the sun. It is behind The Fool, over his shoulder, lighting the whole scene. Waite wrote one of his loveliest lines about it:

The sun, which shines behind him, knows whence he came, whither he is going, and how he will return by another path after many days.

You don't have to share Waite's mysticism to find comfort in that sentence. When you are starting over, the part of your life you are walking away from does not disappear. It is behind you, and in a way it is lighting the path. Everything you learned, everything you loved, everything that hurt: it all came with you, as the ground under your feet and the light at your back.

And "by another path after many days" is a phrase worth sitting with. You may come back to the things that matter to you. Not by the same road. By another one, later than you'd like.

Beginning before you're ready

The hardest part of most beginnings is that they start before you feel ready. You'd like to grieve first, rest first, understand first, and then begin. But life rarely works in that order. The new chapter often opens while you are still sad about the last one.

The Fool doesn't wait for readiness either. His step is already in the air. That isn't a demand that you be brave or cheerful. It is permission to begin while still unsure, and to let the first step be very small.

The rest of the journey

In a popular modern way of reading the deck, The Fool is the traveler of the whole Major Arcana. He meets The Magician and The High Priestess, the Emperor and the Hermit, Death and The Tower, and, near the end, The Star, The Sun and The World. It is a long road, and much of it is hard.

But it starts here, with an open sky and a road that goes on along the ridge. The edge in this picture is the beginning of the journey, never the end of it. If you are at your own beginning tonight, not by choice, with very little in your bundle, you are in the oldest position in the deck. People have been starting over for as long as there have been people. The card doesn't tell you what comes next. It just stands beside you, looking out at the same sky, and takes one small step forward along the path.

For more on the card itself, read the full meaning of The Fool. If today is a heavy one, there is a quieter page for that: a card for a hard day.