It's Spring! Rabbit holes, hares and rediscovering our childhood wonder.
Black tailed Jackrabbit

It's Spring! Rabbit holes, hares and rediscovering our childhood wonder.

Closing in on spring, we’re seeing a plethora of Jackrabbits zig-zagging our yard.? Most mornings, 4 or 5 juveniles scamper out from the Manzanita bush, bolting from rock to tree to dirt pile and back before I’ve made my first cup of coffee.? They’re entertaining, sometimes getting into rabbit boxing matches. They're also efficient landscapers nibbling down star thistle and filaree weed shoots before they get out of hand.? Watching their antics makes me think of rabbit holes only to discover that Jackrabbits aren’t rabbits but hares. They don't dig or go down rabbit holes.? Jackrabbits make nests in well-protected bushes, their young born with hair and eyes wide open. They can run and hop shortly after birth.?

Rabbits are born hairless, blind and helpless requiring~ you got it~rabbit holes.

Jackrabbit boxing

Having gone down scores of rabbit holes over the course of my career, I’m wondering why they got such a bad rap.? How many business strategy sessions rein us in from the rabbit hole as if it’s a mortal hazard? Many meetings include ideation, proposed solutions on post-it notes, organizing like to like thoughts on a whiteboard to solve business problems. These meetings are efficient and inclusive group-think producing next steps, but are we missing something? What is the provenance of a bonafide rabbit hole? And should we avoid one?

Who knows where this leads?


Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland made going down the rabbit hole a thing.? We can interpret Alice’s journey into the subconscious, surrealism, or the suspension of time:

Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next.”

I love how Carroll pairs “wonder” with “looking” and “plenty of time”. Thinking back over 35 years of business meetings, it’s hard to put my finger on moments of wonder or suspended time to look around. Did I ever feel like I had hours to be enchanted by what might happen next? That "what" felt pre-ordained by goals, sales thresholds and financial targets calculated in Excel spreadsheet columns quarter after quarter and year after year.

Time ticks in dollars and work needs to be done.

Here’s the thing with work.? I was so busy doing that I lost wonder.? I ticked the minutes, hours, days and years and forgot to look around and explore all the “what ifs” that might happen next.? I gained career and financial stability by accepting the limitations of possibility and being a successful adult, but at what cost? Seanan McGuire captures this idea beautifully in her series of books titled Wayward Children.

Children have always tumbled down rabbit holes, fallen through mirrors, been swept away by unseasonal floods or carried off by tornadoes. Children have always traveled, and because they are young and bright and full of contradictions, they haven’t always restricted their travel to the possible. Adulthood brings limitations like gravity and linear space and the idea that bedtime is a real thing, and not an artificially imposed curfew. Adults can still tumble down rabbit holes and into enchanted wardrobes, but it happens less and less with every year they live. Maybe this is a natural consequence of living in a world where being careful is a necessary survival trait, where logic wears away the potential for something bigger and better than the obvious. Childhood melts, and flights of fancy are replaced by rules. Tornados kill people: they don’t carry them off to magical worlds. Talking foxes are a sign of fever, not guides sent to start some grand adventure.

But children, ah, children. Children follow the foxes, and open the wardrobes, and peek beneath the bridge. Children climb the walls and fall down the wells and run the razor’s edge of possibility until sometimes, just sometimes, the possible surrenders and shows them the way to go home.”

Seanan McGuire, Beneath the Sugar Sky


We’re on the cusp of spring, longer horizons and life blossoming beneath our toes.?Find your rabbit hole and take your time going down to rediscover that kid you were before responsibility, rules, logic, safety and practicality took charge.


Maybe aging is going down that rabbit hole to find our way back to childhood wonder?

James Schuster

Senior Vice President, Region Manager, US Bancorp Investments, Inc (Retired July 2021)

12 个月

Very insightful and fun read Lisa! Spring is a special time! ??

回复
Mike Malmquist

Senior Vice President - U.S. Bank Institutional Client Group

1 年

Lisa, I'm glad you retired if that's what it took to allow you the time to write more often. Loving your ponderings and mindfulness instigators! Keep them coming...

Love this, Lis.

要查看或添加评论,请登录

Lisa Trombley的更多文章

  • Reasons to hate January and to make a resolution to REST

    Reasons to hate January and to make a resolution to REST

    There are so many reasons to hate January~ to name a few: Christmas tree needles on the floor reinforcing the holidays…

    3 条评论
  • Performance Review Time? Get Ready for Dodgeball!

    Performance Review Time? Get Ready for Dodgeball!

    It’s December and the clock is ticking on performance reviews. Whether you’re a seasoned employee grinding through…

    7 条评论
  • A gift for being laid off during the holidays

    A gift for being laid off during the holidays

    Laid off for the holidays? May you find this unexpected gift~ Corporations have a knack for layoffs right before the…

    2 条评论
  • October leaves and corporate layoffs

    October leaves and corporate layoffs

    I love morning walks in October, how the sunrise slants on the mountains, through pine needles, glints off the creek…

    30 条评论
  • Lessons from Burning Man's Temple of Together

    Lessons from Burning Man's Temple of Together

    Every August since 2000, a temple rises from a two hundred mile alkali lake bed in Black Rock Desert, framed to the…

    10 条评论
  • How to navigate a real Fire Drill

    How to navigate a real Fire Drill

    Here we go again. Five and a half years after California’s deadliest Camp Fire destroyed my hometown of Paradise, today…

    8 条评论
  • How to get through a Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad, No Good Day.

    How to get through a Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad, No Good Day.

    For kids growing up in the 70’s, Alexander’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day was a reading staple along with…

    10 条评论
  • The foulest 4 letter word in business~ it's not what you think . .

    The foulest 4 letter word in business~ it's not what you think . .

    I have a bone to pick with a four letter word~ “than”. “Than” may seem innocuous and even a necessary by-product of…

    2 条评论
  • The Case for Time Out

    The Case for Time Out

    Did you get put in time out as a kid? I did a really bad thing as a precocious and overly confident 10 year old. I…

  • Payday, interest, Thoreau and a hook

    Payday, interest, Thoreau and a hook

    For the past 26 years, February was bonus month ~ Payday with a capital P for the business objectives achieved in the…

    6 条评论

社区洞察

其他会员也浏览了