April Fool’s

I don’t mean the joking or pranking kind because that will be over with by the time you’re reading this, that holiday will have passed, all the brilliant gags sprung, all the dumb pranks…pranked. Rather the April fool’s that makes you think Spring is here, that it has arrived, Old Man Winter is asleep again and Ms. Spring is eager to show us what she can do with a lot of green and a few other colors.

I mean it too, dear readers, where I sit currently in East Tennessee it is a whopping forty-two degrees at a quarter-to-ten in the evening, with snow forecasted in the mountains near me as well overnight, meaning the temp will go lower as this night shivers on.

Three days ago it was above seventy degrees out and sunny…April fool’s indeed.
I noticed it has worked this way in my personal life this month as well, as situations change and rearrange in such ways that I’m not sure if I’m being fooled or perhaps I am the fool myself.

It certainly feels like a prank gone wrong at times or maybe, as I mentioned, my geographic location in this piece maybe a prank gone ‘south’ is more witty wordplay.

But then maybe that’s the point.

Maybe the reason we get cold days in Spring that will make you wish for the heat to flood back is because they are there to teach us, they are the fall from the horse, the proverbial litmus test for the soul, the day that can either enlighten or destroy.

That may be a dramatic way of seeing it, if not almost darkly romantic, but living through those days where a chill screams at you in the bitter wind is really what shapes us.

People of all sorts have been carved from the extreme heat and cold teetering between light and dark, good and evil, heroes and villains, both were not carved on calm days; our troubles usually start and sometimes end at very opposite ends of the spectrum.

All we can do is prepare, to not let the fool enjoy so much time on the floor, to not allow him to trick us with misdirection, not to juggle shiny distractions we chase without catching, and not to allow him to laugh in our faces when we fall.
We all realize we usually are setting up our own pranks for ourselves, wasting our sunny days to chase the jester’s worrying wares, letting the cold settle into our newly risen Spring rather than casting it aside as a blip in time.

Answers are never easy so we reach for them where they are when we can find them, so perhaps hilariously enough, it is Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi of Star Wars game that can explain the base truth behind the fools and jesters who prank us with the quote: “Who is more foolish? The fool or the fool who follows him?”

Don’t follow, the cold will go away if you can stick it out, it’s just another April fool’s.