%title Be a Fool
Dear Matt,
You should be a fool. Not that you haven’t been a fool in the past. Or I should say, you’ve really been a dunce in the past. We’ll use dunce as the pejorative form, because here we will consider being a fool to be a positive thing. An enormously positive thing. In fact, you’ve been a dunce for not being a fool.
You’ve read _Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind_ so you understand the concept of ‘beginner’s mind’ which is totally essential to zen practice.
Assuming you are a fool is great for so many reasons. You will never feel patronized when someone explains something to you, because you are a fool and you need all the help you can get. You will work harder than other people, because you know you are a fool, and hence not exceedingly intelligent, so you will have to make up that disadvantage with pure grit.
You will get along with people, because you are continually humbled that they would even associate with a person as foolish as yourself.
You will regain your sense of childish wonder at all the fascinating complexity in the world. You will never turn away from an opportunity to learn. You will know that every moment is an opportunity to grow.
You used to think you were smart. And you’ve come to realize that was a huge mistake. Whenever a subject was difficult and it challenged the illusion of your intellect, you would shun it and declare it to be boring dross, not worthy of a mind so capable as your own. What a dunce you were! How many learnings you missed because you were not a fool! Can you see that it was your ego that made chemistry difficult? That you refused to learn, because you thought you were smart? Whereas had you been dumb, you would have embraced the difficulty of the learning. Everything is difficult when you are a fool, because a fool undertakes everything without conception of whether it is possible or not. A dunce lives a life of ease, only doing what he can without effort. And it turns out, there isn’t a lot that can be done without effort. Can you harken back to when all you did was browse the internet, passively watch movies, lazed around all day aimlessly? And yet you felt so ‘smart’. How easy it is to analyze a film and a book, but how hard they are to create. How easy it is to be a critic, and how hard to be a writer. Do the things that are hard. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be fun. Embrace your foolishness.
If you aren’t a fool, if you think you have an important ego full of interesting insights, then you are liable to be hurt when someone attacks your ideas as illogical, finds your ideas trite and commonplace, ridicules your ideas, steals your ideas, ignores your ideas. But if you are a fool you rejoice when someone points out a flaw in your logic. You laugh at their ridicule, for they are very funny, and you love to be the butt of a joke. You don’t value your ideas, so what matter if someone steals them? You are used to being ignored.
A fool’s life is an easy life. You might find this paradoxical, but the harder way to live is always easier. Practice being a fool, I promise you won’t feel fooled. Or you will, and that is the goal. Can I fool you into being a fool? Can you fool yourself into being a fool? Who’s to say who’s a fool anyway? Fool me and I’ll fool you, because it’s quite fun to fool around. Don’t fools seem to have fun? They are too foolish to realize the world is serious.