It’s the month of March. The Month of Madness. And much madness is brewing between the painted lines of the wooden court, as mockery is made of the meaning of ESPN’s Master Science, Bracketology. My Kings, the Tar Heel Kings of the year past, shall be dethroned, and that I doth bemoan but the mission of the Madness remains the same – determine the kings who will sit upon the throne of Hoops - a 1, 2, 4, or maybe a 10, could claim the fame.
Ok. It doesn’t matter much to me. My bracket is toast – stale toast, Villanova was my chosen King, and Kansas his heir. Both were beheaded by the axe of lower seeds.
So before I lose my cool, lets talk about another type of Madness, The Madness of the Mad Hatter in the world of a girl named Alice. Last week I saw Tim Burton’s version of the Lewis Carrol Classic, Alice in Wonderland.
As a child, Alice had it sorted out - she was all that and a bag of chips. But chips don’t age like wine, and Alice must have left her back of chips open too long, because like my toast, her chips went stale. Her “all-that-ness” became “a whole lotta-notta-ness.”
Props to the Mad Hatter for calling her out – Muchity, much, much, much – you seem to have lost your Muchness.
And seriously, who likes to be called out for their lack of muchness? I for one hate being challenged for not giving all my much at training. But it happens. And, sometimes you need someone to call you out - spark your fire, ignite your madness. Just ask North Carolina Coach Karen Shelton, she used to always call me out. Muchness challenged is muchness ignited.
But can you really blame Alice? We can’t really expect her, or anyone for that matter, to live by their muchness, all the time. So maybe Alice didn’t lose her muchness as much as she just let it go dormant. So she needed to find the key that unlocked it – she needed to hear the alarm clock to awaken it.
But in order to reawaken and rediscover her muchness, she had to encounter a bit of madness. So she tumbled down a massive hole, entering a world where nothing made sense. All was madness. Alice lost herself, she lost her mission. She confronted doubt, evil, and her fears. She was challenged to find herself by traveling through the Madness.
Like Alice, we USA F. Hockeyers have been encountering Madness. The Madness of a Slippery Sand Hill three times a week. The Madness in the voice of our coaches challenging us to move our feet faster, lift our knees higher, and to dig a little deeper. The Madness of exhausted bodies, and tired minds. The Madness of knowing the feat that we will face, the Jabberwalkie, named the Qualifier. Its the Madness of the unknown – will we find our Muchness in time?
Alice did. She rediscovered her muchness, just as her muchness was called upon to serve her. It was her muchness that allowed her to accomplish 7 impossible things before breakfast. And that gave her confidence to slay the Jabberwalkie.
And after she won, Madness danced. Madness danced the Futterwacken because Alice got her Muchness back.
(I just read this post to Maren Ford. Her reply was, “Rachel, you are weird. Mad weird.”)
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