Alice claimed that she sometimes believed six impossible things before breakfast. By doing so, she had great adventures, far beyond the limitations and possibilities set out for her by other people’s beliefs.
In Tim Burton’s fantastic new film, Alice in Wonderland, Alice is portrayed as a ingénue who is caught between two worlds: the staid expectations and beliefs of her Victorian era social structure (as lived and endorsed by her family), and the world of the possible, as taught and demonstrated by her late father, a man with visions of grandeur and adventure in far-off lands.
Like Alice, we have the same tug-of-war inside of us. Our biology drives us in two directions at once: toward the secure, same, and known on the one hand, and toward the new, the novel, and the unknown on the other. We live inside this tension, and we make our lives work – or not – by dealing with these opposite urges within us.
