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The Fool in the centre of the Matrix of Destiny

Mechanics. You look like a person without baggage. Lightness, readiness to drop everything and go, no weight in the voice: a stranger finds it easy to start talking to you, and people nearby for some reason also begin to feel freer and do what they usually do not allow themselves. Age is not readable on you. At forty-five you can be the liveliest person in a room full of thirty-year-olds, and it is not playing at youth but honest curiosity, which in the others switched off by about twenty-five. You break rules without offence. You feel boundaries, but ignore conventions, and are forgiven.

Works when you need to start from zero, invent what has not been, walk in where you know nobody: a new venture, a foreign country, a change of profession at forty, creative work without training. You have no fear of a blank page. Where the experienced explain why it will not work, you simply try, and in about one case out of five it turns out to work. That one case is usually enough to pay back the four before it.

Breaks when lightness turns into irresponsibility. Promises are handed out generously and kept as it happens; agreements live exactly until an interesting offer appears; people used to counting on you one day stop, and you do not even notice. The second failure is the eternal beginning. Every year a new venture from zero, and not one has lived to the point where it starts to pay.

What it looks like:

• You can leave for a weekend in another city, having decided that morning, and do not see what is strange about it.
• You change jobs more often than most of your acquaintances, and each time it is honest delight and not flight, though from outside it looks the same.
• Boring obligatory things pile up until someone else clears them.

What to do.

1. Stay with one thing for more than three years. Just to find out what is there, behind the boredom.
2. Write promises down. Your memory is selective, and it hits those close to you.
3. Keep a short list of obligations and close it before anything interesting.

Takeaway: you are loved for your freedom; freedom becomes a life when at least something is brought to the end.