I had one of my little epiphanies today, of a particular sort, and I am not exactly sure what it means, so I thought I would talk about it with you nice people and try to figure it out.

This particular kind of epiphany happens when my subconscious mind puts a word or a phrase into my head that is immediately invested with enormous meaning because it is the nucleus around which a lot of my recent thinking crystallizes.

Before, it was the question “What if I really am a giant? What then?”.

Today it was the idea that I am a wildcard.

I don’t know why that word instantly appealed to me when it popped into my head, but it just seems to fit. I was born a wildcard, a fluke, an unpredictable and variable effect. A mystery wrapped in an enigma and stuffed inside a joke. I was born to stand just a little outside normal reality (okay, a lot outside) and both challenge and entertain people.

It’s a trickster thing. I have never been comfortable with my trickster nature because, on the surface of it, the trickster can seem kind of evil. Certainly to people who are not chaotic by nature and who have been the victim of other people’s malicious “tricks”, the jester-trickster seems like a total asshole. A leering, mocking, cruel clown who does awful things to people and gets away with it by calling it humour and being too clever to ever be pinned down to a crime.

Yeah, I am more or less talking about The Joker.

But the trickster, or in my case the wildcard, need not be malicious. A comedian is just as much a trickster as the Joker. Part of the trickster’s job has always been to entertain. To reduce tension with clever jokes or just plain silliness, to help people cope with the gravity of reality by offering the levity of wit, to ease people’s cognitive dissonance by using satire to help them reconcile conflicting ideas, even to help them understand new ideas and maybe even expand their minds a little by presenting new thoughts in a light and entertaining form.

That is how I view my own trickster nature. (Maybe the problem is the name. Trickster. Tricks. Tricking people. Sounds bad. )

This wildcard idea though, it appeals to me too strongly for me to ignore just because I don’t understand it yet. I will figure it out in time. I have faith that this is leading me somewhere I really need to go.

I know that for me, comedy is not just a game or a trick. I believe in comedy. Comedy, to me, is almost like a religion in that it is through comedy that I have felt the greatest sense of connectedness and comfort, and I have seen how comedy can sooth the soul and even make the world seem like a better place to people. Comedy can transform tension into pleasure, pain into joy, enemies into friends. It can bridge the gap between people, between tribes, between nations.

It can even help heal the body by healing the spirit. Yes, I think I can safely say that I believe in comedy.

And that is sort of trickster-like. But this wildcard idea is bigger than that. It is part trickster but also something else. When I think of the word now, with all its brand new and electrically thrilling connections, I am not seeing a playing card or a jester with bells on his feet, even though that is literally what a wildcard usually is in this culture.

It is something more nebulous but far far more potent than that. It is more like a shining, shimmering, scintillating star with a bright shiny beautiful jewel at its center, eternally brilliant, fascinating, and wonderful. Its colors shifting and shimmering, never the exact same twice, but always wondrously beautiful and magnificently rich and deep. The sort of thing that soothes the mind by stimulating it. The kind of thing that can light the way to a whole new way of thinking, feeling, and being for the whole world, and do so with grace, wit, and supreme gentleness.

And I think the gem is me.

Or rather, my idea self. The one I am trying to birth into the world. The self that has the confidence and receptivity to open the doors wide to the world and share all the wonders that reside within me. Someone who is not closed off by fear but motivated by joy and a great and ever-flowing love for life. Someone who can walk tall through the world, unashamed, and greet the world with a smile and a hug and a hearty how-do-you-do.

Someone whose spirit has finally grown big and strong enough to support that big bad brain of his.

Why this all attaches to the world “wildcard” is beyond me at the moment. Perhaps it was a revelation whose time had come and “wildcard” was the closest thing to a word to describe it that my brain could come up with at that moment.

A wildcard in the sense of something undefined, unlimited, unknowable, uncontrolled, something that can be whatever it needs to be when the time comes and is not forced to choose one form and stick with it for eternity. Something pure and beautiful, untouched and eternal, shining brightly for all to see.

Despite that extraordinarily vague definition, I feel like I got in touch with a big part of myself today. I crossed some vital divide and integrated a big piece of myself back into the new wholeness I am creating.

I am all about the decompartmentalization now. Time to take everything out of its boxes and put it all together.

It is the only way that I can become a real little boy.

You know, I just might be on a spiritual journey now.

Keen. I didn’t think us materialists got those.

See you tomorrow, all you wonderful people!