Rabbit Holes

Rabbit holes. That is what is on my mind today. I love learning. I love reading about new things. I love challenging my thoughts about the way that things work, including the world, people (including myself), animals, and nature. I don't mean to sound limiting in any way, because I feel quite the opposite. I am excited to learn about new things -- things that I didn't know before or hadn't really thought about to any great depth. I enjoy being challenged about my perceptions, my knowledge, and my experience. Isn't life exciting? I believe that it is when we open up our thinking to embrace these principles.

What are these principles? I believe that they are pretty universal. Right now I am excited about permaculture ideas. I explored this subject area about 10 years ago, and then life tugged at me to pay attention to more immediate concerns in my family and my workplace. My explorations took a back seat and waited until I had more free time to think, plan, experiment, and learn. And, when I had more financial resources to make this next phase of my life a little easier.

Time to get my lab coat on. Time to pull out new journals and notebooks. How will I do my research? What questions will I want to answer? How will I record my theories and hypotheses? How will I test my ideas? How will I keep records of my learning?

When I think about all of these questions, I also think about rabbit holes. My life has been full of the exploration of rabbit holes. There are times when I have allowed myself to be distracted and deflected in a rabbit hole direction. My rationale was that I was learning. I was becoming a person with more ideas. I was someone who was growing. I was planning something that I would do in the future.

All of those thoughts are true, but I was also allowing myself to learn how to be distracted, possibly unfocused, and diffused in my efforts and likely my results. I was not teaching myself a very valuable set of lessons around the concept of constraint. What are those lessons?

The world is full of rabbit holes. There is nothing wrong with rabbit holes, and one can create a life that is full of them. There will be no shortage of opportunities to learn and explore and experiment. My life will be filled with new people. However, a life with the freedom to explore any or all rabbit holes will be a life that may not yield actual accomplishment. Learning and research are not always synonomous with action and results. Let's make a distinction now between "buffering" and "results," because these are two concepts that differ from each other.

Yes, I can redefine these words to make them sound and feel good, and many of us do that. We avoid doing things because of psychological hesitations: fear of failure (or possibly success), fear of rejection (or acceptance), or fear of not knowing how to do something. Pretty much anything we want to accomplish comes with a fear of something. So, we avoid doing so that we can avoid fearing.

When I learned the story of Alice in Wonderland, I first thought of the courage she had to go down the rabbit hole. In my mind the rabbit hole was the scary place. Maybe I don't remember the story all that well and how Alice came to go down the hole. I remember thinking about how scary a hole actually is because one cannot envision what one will encounter while traveling inside and along the hole. The rabbit hole is a powerful metaphor for much of life, yes?

As my life has continued, I have learned to respect rabbit holes. They are not just opportunities to get lost and live without thought and direction -- living experientially and without planning. Rabbit holes are also scary places. They contain unknown experiences and possibilities of good and bad and everything along the continuum between those polar ends.

At what point will I decide to engage with my life? At what point will I decide which direction I want to go and why and how I choose to go that way?

The answer to this last set of questions lies with the decision to envision and create. What do I envision? What do I want to create? If I allow myself to dream in this way, then I will follow a path that leads somewhere.

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the [Cheshire] Cat.

"I don't much care where —" said Alice.

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

"— so long as I get SOMEWHERE," Alice added as an explanation.

"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

--- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland