Fools Rush In

During my 20s adventures, I pretty much lived by the words of the song, Fools Rush In. I threw caution to the wind in Rome, Florence, London, and cities all over the US. I took risks in cars and bars. I sang and danced, dated strangers, and floated from one enriching or entertaining job to another. My luck held. Maybe even then, I used my intuition.

Intuition can be confusing though. A little voice tells us something is going to happen, and we ignore it. One person acts cold and we think they don’t like us, but then it turns out they were just lost in thought, attending to the problems of their day.

Most of the time, we know so much, like who can be trusted and who can’t, but we sometimes act like a fool and rush in. But wait, let’s examine the fool card in the tarot deck. In the 1950s, most of the kids in my neighborhood couldn’t afford a deck of cards. My siblings and I had multiple decks, since our parents played cards with friends and hated bent edges. As kids, if we had a noticeably bent card, we’d take a joker and write on it, Jack of Diamonds, and use it for a replacement

Adaptable, that’s the fool, like in Fool on the Hill, a song by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The Fool tarot card means trust and let go. Johnny Mercer, my favorite lyricist, who I adore even more than Ira Gershwin and Lennon-McCartney, wrote the lyrics to Fools Rush In. The last line is…open up your heart and let this fool rush in.