I get off on experience. Rather, in understanding an experience fully. No matter how minute it may seem to someone else, I like to delve into the intricacies of something and get a complete perception of the thing.
Boredom can set it quickly with me, though, and I often abandon the something when I feel like I know it completely, or if I feel like I can see the end of the ride. It takes a lot to hold my interest for a long time. It takes even more sometimes just to capture my attention.
Even Alice (Lewis Carroll's original Alice) wasn't so interested in the talking White Rabbit; she didn't find him to be curious in and of himself. It's only when "the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet.., she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge."
In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.
She jumps down the hole, curious about the things she sees as she falls—the cupboards and bookshelves that line the walls of the passage, the empty ORANGE MARMALADE jar that she refuses to drop because she doesn't want it to land on anyone below her. And she doesn't look down, doesn't watch for what's to come, because it's dark and she can't see what's there.
Honestly, I'm attracted to rabbit holes. There's something alluring about the experience that looks like not much of nothin'. From the outside, from the onset, it's just a hole in the ground. There may be a rabbit. There may be a snake. There be just a hole. But you can never know until you look inside.
For Alice, the inside of the rabbit hole opens up a fantastical world of imagination and nonsense, of life lessons and epiphanies, but she does nothing with that. She wanders from place to place in Wonderland, questioning everything but never coming to any real understandings. Interestingly, the White Rabbit appears three times in the story, ushering Alice from one mad situation to another. He's not the reason she does anything; he's simply a catalyst to move her from place to place.
Eventually Alice becomes maddened by the surreality and wakes from her dream, having learned nothing about herself or life or anything. "You're nothing but a pack of cards!" She is, after all, a child. And it's Alice's sister's thoughts that close the story, hoping that Alice will keep her girlish whimsy and be able to share her curiosity with other children when she's a grown woman.
Conversely, Tim Burton's Alice—the grown, almost-adult Alice—is the one who doesn't leap down the hole. Instead she sees the White Rabbit (Nivens McTwisp) running through the garden and is immediately captivated, chasing him in an attempt to flee her own surprise engagement party. Just when she loses sight of him, he grabs her by the ankle and yanks her off her feet.
She was falling down the rabbit hole.
This time Alice is looking around as she tumbles, scrambling for anything that will help her make sense of what's happening, that will help stop her fall. She again grabs the empty jam jar, but this time she drops it without thought of who or what may be below her. She keeps falling, "...down and down and down into deeper darkness, where there was no longer anything to hold on to."
McTwisp still appears to help move Alice from one absurdity to another, but his role is much more intentional than it was for Carroll's Alice. He reveals that he had gone above ground to actively seek Alice, to return her to Underland (Wonderland) to fulfill her destiny of slaying the Jabberwocky. He does everything in his power to help propel her toward her eventual conclusion of self-revelation and self-acceptance, though he's still not a major character in any traditional sense.
Almost Alice's journey into the hole is not of her own doing, though it's certainly her choice to chase the rabbit that led her toward the discovering of it. Once inside, she again battles her own preconceptions to make sense of everything around her. Even though she seems to forget this third trip into Wonderland, she is left with the revelation of self-confidence that she didn't have before. She returns to the garden where she first saw the White Rabbit and finds herself clinging to the edge of the rabbit hole. She pulls herself up and out of the hole and returns to the party to share her insights with everyone else.
I tend to be a hole jumper. I often seek out the rabbit holes and go sometimes head first into them, just to see what's lining the shelves and to explore the possibly-unimaginable that I might find inside. I'm fascinated by those new things, no matter how dusty or potentially frightening they may be, because it's an opportunity to understand something in a whole new way.
Sometimes I'm dragged down the hole, pulled in by my own White Rabbit, and I'm more likely to tumble, to not be able to get my bearings until I hit the bottom. Hard. But I will eventually find a way to upright myself and take a look around and try my best to make sense of it all, even if it ends up making sense only to me.
The biggest fear, of course, is that it's not a rabbit hole at all, but just a hole, that there is no experiential advantage to be gained. In that case, I pull myself up and out, and I keep moving forward along my own garden path until the Rabbit rushes past me again, leading me on to my next discovery.
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