Imagine a test of strength and wit unlike you’ve ever faced. Every challenge you’ve learned to overcome has only prepared you for this. It comes in waves, one attack, one puzzle, one challenge at a time. The first waves are manageable, familiar even. You’ve done this before. As you clear each wave though, it gets harder, mixing the familiar in different ways, old and old, old and new. Wave after wave, doubling and tripling the difficulty, the volume, the speed, the intensity. Until at last you fail, you collapse. You have the option to begin again, from the very start.
It was inevitable that you failed, by design one might say. You were prepared and capable from previous experiences, but the arena only opens with that baseline. The increased challenges push you further, and your only preparation for those are the trial itself.
You try again and realize a few small things you can do better and quicker from the start. These waves become no longer about winning but surviving with enough energy, or strength, or will, in reserve to take on the fresh challenges to come. This becomes a trial of resilience, more than competency. Competency will come naturally, as you learn from your mistakes. But resilience is only built in your ability to take the mistakes, to take the failure, and to start again.
You can’t start from where you left off. That would be easier, rinse and repeat, perfect practice in perfect conditions. No, the ‘Trial of the Fool’ asks you each time to start off from scratch. Maybe you spent hours, days, years getting to that part of the trial where you always fall, always fail. And now that you have, again, you must start all over. Through the easier stages, the long and tedious steps you’ve repeated so many times. This is what makes you want to quit, to not begin again. This is what true failure is, not the failure to complete the trial, not the failure to get past that one stage you’ve never completed. The failure of deciding not to try anymore.
And that’s not who you want to be, you’ve been told, you’ve told yourself, all your life, you’re not a quitter, society hates a quitter! So you begin again. Although those opening stages that were once boring and easy, you can decide to tweak and refine them. Use this repetition to your advantage, learn from the fundamentals, do them faster, better, hell, even more creatively. Anything to spend the time in preparation for what’s to come. And the waves of the unknown after that.
So you’ve done it, you’ve learned to start over. You are playing the ‘Trial of the Fool.’ Your home is that arena, until you fail – again, again, and dear god, again. You allow yourself a break from time to time. You sleep, you vacation, you try a new hobby. Until you remember again, society hates a quitter.
You begin again, with buried contempt of what’s to come. You remind yourself of the opportunities at the boring beginnings. To experiment, to refine, to act on impulse. All the while, what carries you forward is that sweet dream of something, anything new! Of clearing that one, previously impossible stage, and to see what’s next. Something new to fail at, or dare you think, to spot a finish line, to claim a victory. To win.
But that only makes you wonder, what if there is no finish line, what if there is no winning? What if wave after wave invites the next, forever, ad infinitum? What if your doom and destiny has confined you in this endless trial? Worse, what if the trial itself is of your own making? Not static, but self-perpetuating? Not designed but adapted to your own madness? Ever-lasting, ever-reaching, never-ending discontent. Who now is the fool? The one who quits this Trial, or the one who plays it forever, in foolish hope that there will be an end.
And somehow, knowing all of that, changes nothing. Society hates a quitter. What a ridiculous thing to resent. What an incredibly cynical reason to do or not to do. So you sit with that for a moment. Maybe longer than a moment. Looking around the arena, on pause, waiting to see if you’ll try one more time.
Society might just seek to make us fools of us all. You start again, and keep playing some more. You fail and keep beginning. But you don’t quit. Because why? Because to quit is to assume you already know the answer. That there is no point, no end, no trophy worth finding.
By engaging in this trial, as a fool or as the wise man, you are surrendering to hope. A special type of faith, that even when you can’t prove a victory exists. You seek it regardless, you believe it blindly. You enjoy anticipation as its own reward. You play the trial with the acceptance that you are one busy, happy fool.
Paul Carreo 