I have a small collection of Alice and Wonderland editions from various illustrators. While I will always have the original Tenniel illustrations stamped on my imagination as the images of the story, it’s fascinating to see how different illustrators and artists have interpreted it. Alice begs for us to imagine freely. Sometimes the drawings are whimsical and sweet, sometimes they lean toward romantic and dreamy, and others can be quite grotesque or surreal.
My favorite illustration in any collection is always Alice following the rabbit. The quaint Gordon Robinson illustration featured at top of this post sat on my desk for almost fifteen years. It was a sort guiding motto for me.
(Here’s Robinson’s entire illustrated Alice.)
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been led by curiosity, and because I get interested in many many things, that often means frequent change and some wildly different rabbit holes. It hasn’t always been easy, in part because I haven’t always given myself permission to follow my endless curiosity. Often I am straining under the weight of a desire to be consistent. Consistency is a good thing, I tell myself. Consistency allows you to follow one path and succeed on that path. It’s stable. When you are consistent, people more easily understand you. In online business, for example, the message is always, “be consistent with your branding and your message!” And I see that this strategy has some common sense especially if you want consistent paying customers.
And yet there is the part of me that relishes Emerson’s phrase, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I enjoy paradoxes and change and even have come to embrace the feeling, when I know I have it, of cognitive dissonance. I have spent long periods of time defending a certain idea in my mind, knowing full well that whenever an opposing idea starts to feel like a threat I am eventually going to change my mind. I have learned to trust that beneath cognitive dissonance is something deeper and truer and usually a lot more lighthearted.
And honestly, the breaking point of cognitive dissonance is the space where most comedy happens!
I’ll go even further and say it is where most joy happens. Joy is the relief of worry and pressure. It’s ecstatic and goofy, imaginative and unexplainable.
p.s. some Alice book covers, just for fun:
