What's Wrong with Falling Down the Rabbit Hole?

This is a written summary of my latest video, for those who prefer to read them. 

I’m sure you know by now that I’m a huge Alice in Wonderland fan, so I’m sure my question will make some sense to you! 

Have you noticed how many times you hear the phrase “I’m not going down that rabbit hole”, or something like it?  The rabbit hole seems to get a bad wrap in our language today.  People almost always talk about it in a negative context.  Why is that, do you suppose?  I mean, after all, that’s how Alice’s adventures in Wonderland began.  Alice’s actual fall down that rabbit hole lasts a LONG time.  In the version of the book I have, it’s over three pages.  Imagine falling down a rabbit hole while reading three pages before you land!  Impossible, right? 

But here’s the thing.  During that whole fall, Alice didn’t panic.  She talked to herself a bit about how her cat would miss her, whether or not it was possible to fall all the way through the earth and where she would land, but she didn’t panic at all.  She just noticed the shelves full of things that were on the walls of the rabbit hole.  She did eventually land, of course, and guess what.  She was not hurt in that fall or landing.  So what makes us think we will be?   

Maybe we are afraid of what we’ll find at the bottom or what other people will think of us if we do let go and take that fall.  Alice ends up finding a new reality down that rabbit hole — one that in a lot of ways is exactly the opposite of what she thought was real.  She realizes, for example, that she’s no longer the person she was yesterday. I mean, are we who we think we are?  Are the people around us?  

While she’s present in Wonderland, Alice makes decisions based on gut instinct that lead to even more changes to herself and her surroundings.  In other words, her actions change her reality.  She meets new cast of characters, including one of my favorites, a queen who tells her that she often believes six impossible things before breakfast!  After all these adventures, and after Alice finds out even more about herself and her ability to change her own reality — if not the opinions of others around her, she returns home safely.

All this change started because Alice followed the white rabbit, who was very concerned with time and others’ opinion of and reaction to him.   Sound familiar?  Maybe we long for change, but it’s much more comfortable for things to just stay the same.   

What if, instead of trying to avoid falling down the rabbit hole, we take the leap and jump right in to the world of our own imagination?  What if instead of panicking about what we’ll find at the bottom, we simply choose to be “curiouser and curiouser”?  In the words of one of my all-time favorite TV shows “imagine the impossibilities.”  After all, imagination is the predecessor to creation.