No Fool Like an Honest One.
No Fool Like an Honest One.
An April Letter · MORO Journal Issue 04
Once a year, the world gives us permission to lie.
April Fools' Day arrives with its pranks and its laughter, and for 24 hours, deception is not just tolerated. It is celebrated. We trick the people we love. We laugh at being fooled. We call it fun.
And then midnight comes, and we go back to wanting the truth.
Which makes you wonder: if honesty is what we crave every other day of the year, why is it so hard to live by?
The Performance We're All Exhausted By
Spring arrives in April without announcement. The trees don't ask permission to bloom. The flowers don't check whether it's a good time. Nature simply becomes what it is, fully and without apology.
We are not so easy with ourselves.
Most of us spend enormous energy managing how we appear. Curating what we share. Softening what we really think. Performing a version of ourselves that feels safer, more acceptable, more palatable to the world around us.
It is exhausting. And deep down, we know it.
The cruelest fool is not the one who tricks others. It is the one who spends a lifetime tricking themselves.
What Lies Actually Cost Us
We tend to think of lies as things we tell other people. But the most damaging ones are quieter than that.
I'm fine. When you're not.
It doesn't matter. When it does.
I don't need help. When you're drowning.
I'll deal with it later. When later never comes.
These small untruths accumulate. They build walls between who you are and who you're pretending to be. And over time, the distance between those two people becomes the loneliest place in the world.
Trust, real trust, begins with yourself. With the willingness to look honestly at what you feel, what you need, what you want, and what is no longer working. That kind of honesty is not comfortable. But it is the only foundation anything real can be built on.
Spring Knows Something We've Forgotten
Watch what happens in April.
The earth doesn't ease into spring gradually, carefully, making sure conditions are perfect. It commits. The blossoms come all at once, reckless and abundant, knowing they might be caught by a late frost. They bloom anyway.
There is something in that worth learning.
Honesty is like that. It doesn't wait for the perfect moment. It doesn't calculate the risk and decide it's too high. It simply arrives, fully, and trusts that the world can handle it.
And here is what we know to be true: the people who can handle your honesty are the only ones worth keeping close.
On Being a Fool
The word "fool" has an old meaning that we've mostly forgotten.
In medieval courts, the fool was the only person allowed to tell the king the truth. Everyone else performed. Everyone else managed their words carefully, protecting their position. The fool alone could say what was real, and be heard precisely because he was dismissed as harmless.
To be a fool, in that sense, was to be free.
There is no fool like an honest one. Because the honest fool has nothing to protect, nothing to perform, nothing to lose. They have only the truth, and the quiet, unshakeable dignity that comes with living by it.
An April Practice
This month, try one small act of radical honesty each week.
Week one: Tell someone how you actually are when they ask. Not "fine." The real answer.
Week two: Identify one thing you've been telling yourself that isn't true. Write it down. Look at it.
Week three: Have the conversation you've been avoiding. The one you keep postponing because the timing isn't right. It will never be right. Do it anyway.
Week four: Let yourself be seen, in one moment, in one relationship, without the performance. Just you, as you are.
The Bravest Thing
Spring doesn't lie about what it is.
Neither should you.
In a world full of curated images and careful performances, choosing to be genuinely, imperfectly, honestly yourself is the most radical thing you can do.
Be the fool. The honest one.
It is the only kind worth being.
With love and honesty,
The MORO Team