Readers do not agree about this card, and the disagreement is old enough to be informative.
The dominant modern reading treats the Fool as beginning, trust and open possibility, and treats his approach to the edge as courage rather than carelessness. A second reading, closer to the older French card, treats him as the holy fool or the vagrant: outside society, unhoused, possibly mad, and not obviously to be envied. A third, common in Marseille-derived practice, declines to fix him at all and reads him positionally, as whatever the spread has not accounted for, the loose element, the thing that will not stay in its category. That last approach follows directly from what the card did in the game.
Reversals are a genuine dispute rather than a matter of taste. Etteilla assigned upright and reversed meanings from his earliest cartomancy work of 1770, and the practice entered occult tarot with him. Waite gives reversed meanings for every card in his companion text and clearly expects them to be used. Much traditional Marseille practice does not use them at all, on the reasonable ground that the older decks have pip cards with no fixed orientation and that a reader working from the whole spread does not need a second meaning bolted onto each card. Many contemporary readers have quietly abandoned reversals for the same reason, and read a difficult card by its neighbours instead.
Where reversals are used, this card is usually taken as recklessness, avoidance, or a beginning refused. That is a defensible reading. It is not the only one available, and it is worth saying plainly that a reader who never turns a card upside down is not doing tarot wrong.