Pretty soon after Alice goes through the looking glass in Lewis Carroll’s delightful and bizarre continuation of the Alice in Wonderland series, she meets the Red Queen. She sees that this whole fantastical world is laid out like a chessboard and dreams of one day becoming a queen herself. The Red Queen delightedly exclaims that she can indeed become a queen, but Alice must start out as a pawn. All of a sudden, the game begins and Alice finds herself running, hand in hand, with the Red Queen who just, “kept crying ‘Faster! Faster!’ but Alice felt she could not go faster, though she had not breath left to say so.”1
As she ran and Alice got more and more winded, she realized something strange – the scenery around them was not changing at all. No matter how fast they ran, they couldn’t get past anything. At first, Alice thought that maybe in this backwards world the scenery ran along with you. In almost utter exhaustion, the queen said they could stop and rest, but Alice sees that they have not moved one bit.
“In great surprise, Alice says, “Why I do believe we’ve been under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!’
‘Of course it is,’ said the Queen, ‘what would you have it?’
‘Well in our country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else – if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’
‘A slow sort of country!’ said the Queen. ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’”2
It seems like anyone you talk to, whatever phase of life that they are in, is busy, busy, busy and tired, tired, tired. We’re running from place to place, we’re filling our schedules ‘til there’s barely time to think or breathe. A study from 2015 found that only 1 in 7 Americans felt well rested each day of the week while 2/5 say they’re tired most of the week.3 We’re running around, we’re not sleeping – but do you ever feel like Alice? Like maybe – for all that work and pain, blood, sweat, and tears – maybe you’re not even getting anywhere?
[i] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12/12-h/12-h.htm
[ii] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12/12-h/12-h.htm
[iii] https://today.yougov.com/topics/lifestyle/articles-reports/2015/06/02/sleep-and-dreams