A Visit to the Rabbit Hole

I was just doing the final tasks after doing a whole whack of the dreaded bookkeeping, and horror of horrors, my computer slowed, stalled and then went black! I had not gotten to the point of doing the final back up.

Now I tend to be a pretty level-headed individual. I’m known for good sense, and the ability to transcend most of our earthly cares. However, this easy going nature does not apply to numbers, the revenue department, and technology malfunction. In fact, this is pretty much my Achilles heel.

The hardware was professionally wiped and software reloaded. Equipment –check! I went back to the bookkeeping and yikes! The beginning balances were not jiving with the statements. By the time I had tracked back to 2007 and it was still unresolved, I was beside myself. Using the adage that ‘it’s not what we know, but who we know’; I called in my chum who has her degree in Combinatorics and Optimization, (a mathy/computer programming thing that for example, plots the flow of traffic through city lights using algorithms). So apparently the software was skipping a gear.

Now here’s the thing. While my chum tended to the computer, and was happily ironing out my files back to 2005, I was sucking back on the chocolate martini she had made for me so that I could survive the stress of the surgery. Oh the cares; the woes! Yes readers, I went right from being a mild-mannered holistic health educator, to a whimpering thing in the corner; hence, the’ rabbit hole’.

Deb Bermont is a more ‘holistic’ business consultant based in the US. She coined the term ‘rabbit hole’ to describe the experience of ‘when the rim of our rut becomes our horizon’. We all have times in our life where we find ourselves looking out upon our lives from the rim. Issues already emotionally loaded from the past lay like holes in the road waiting for us to fall.

Ms. Bermont suggests that we first have to recognize that we are in the rabbit hole. Any thoughts that run through our minds while in it are all the lies we tell ourselves. “I’ll never make it”, “I’ll never be any good at this”, “no matter how hard I try I’ll never….” She suggests that we “heard those lies from people we trusted when we were children, who were at that moment speaking from their own personal pit of lies”. Unfortunately, in our innocence, we believed them and then incorporated these messages into our internal programming. In daily life, at work and at home, we so often connect with the fear based stuff in-between, and then act is if this is truth.

During the darkest part of my three month saga of troubles I was wondering about what life might be like in Argentina. It was far far away, and I love the dance. Needless to say, it is not a good idea to make serious decisions from the rabbit hole.

Talk yourself out of the rabbit hole first or get someone to ‘pull you out by the pigtail’ If you wait until you are on the solid ground of sober thinking, creative solutions appear.

Note: I am now back on track, chunking happily through my numbers. Thanks Kat for pulling me out by the ‘pig tail’.