Muchness
You used to be much more…”muchier.” You’ve lost your muchness.
The Mad Hatter (Lewis Carroll) – Alice in Wonderland
Why is a raven like a writing desk? The Mad Hatter hasn’t the faintest idea. Yet, along the way along Alice discovers the antidote to his enigmatic riddle.
Perhaps you’re a teacher, an engineer, a manager, a dancer, or a musician. Maybe you’re a coffee snob or an undiscovered guitar-hero prodigy. Our sense of self is bound up in what we do each day and if everything falls apart tomorrow, we imagine so would we. Change inspires fear because we expect the worst. If any of these titles are stripped away from us, it feels like an impending doom.
Why IS a raven like a writing desk? Both bring tidings of bad news. What’s the best way to greet bad news? With muchness.
It takes Alice some time and a number of tests before she has the courage to face that she is, in fact, THE Alice… THE Alice who is capable of slaying a jabberwocky. In Wonderland, she stops identifying with all the things she is supposed to do and be, the things that channelled her into a narrow life. Alice remembers who she was before life made her small and, with much muchness, she faces her destiny.
We are ALL subject to the slow dwindling of our muchness. Day by day, we allow ourselves to believe that we are less than who we truly are. We allow ourselves to become small.
Don’t wait for a jabberwocky to appear in your life. Have the courage to be much more yourself, who you were before you became small and face your days with much muchness.
Muchness 
I enjoyed reading your thoughts on this.
I looked into the statistics page today and saw that this post has outstripped the others in hits. A fair amount of that traffic is coming from your muchness project website. Two years on – how is the book going?
Do you think there might come a point, an opportunity, where some of us are faced with a decision about our muchness? Or do you feel its erosion is an inevitability? Moreover, do you think there may be varying qualities of muchness, and that a conscious muchness that’s fostered and given room to grow might be especially valuable?
I’m inclined to think that we’re oblivious to our muchness in our early life, and that we become aware of it most in its absence, in reflective times. At that point of identification, we’re invited either to resign ourselves to a false inevitability about how it dwindles in spite of us – an attitude steeped in judgement and blame – or instead to further identify ways in which that muchness has been lost, and rather than accept that loss, to instead lose that in which it escaped us.