Rabbit holes and Trolls

Fellow Mavericks, this podcast takes us down a rabbit hole, literally and figuratively. From mischievous backyard bunnies to Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, from a small boy’s relentless ‘whys’ at a Mumbai train station to a real road trip chasing giant trolls and completing the ‘trollgrimage’. Join me as I share my thoughts on the fine line between healthy curiosity and toxic overthinking and about finding the courage to wander and the wisdom to come back.

Transcript

Hello Fellow Mavericks, welcome to another exciting episode of the Ordinary Maverick podcast. This is Ajey, your host, an ordinary Maverick sharing real life thoughts, experiences and Maverick tips. If you haven’t hit the subscribe button yet, please do so and you won’t miss another episode. 

Our close encounters with rabbits, or as we like to call them, ‘bunnies’, happened most recently when we moved a few years back into a homestead surrounded by the woods. It was almost like bunnies, bunnies everywhere! The previous owner told us a family of rabbits lived in the garden…but honestly, it never quite felt like just ‘a’ family. There always seemed to be far too many of them hopping about, could they really all be from one family, or had generations of bunnies quietly taken over while we weren’t looking? Cute as they were, they were not my favorite, they demolished my tulips and roses without so much as an apology! I’ve spoken before, Fellow Mavericks, about how much gardening means to me, and if you garden yourself, you know exactly how precious those buds and seedlings are. The bunnies simply eat them all. And for our dog Cleo, full of beans as always, those bunnies are a permanent game of chase, disappearing down their holes in a flash, gone without a trace, leaving her sniffing at the empty burrow, utterly confused about where her new friends or shall I say foes   went.

Which brings me to the phrase ‘down a rabbit hole’. It’s an idiom, if we want to be precise with English grammar and yes, I have my own love-hate history with grammar and the nuns at my convent school, but that’s a story for another day! Idioms are those wonderful little expressions where the meaning has nothing to do with the literal words. Say ‘that’s a piece of cake’ — there’s no actual cake, it just means something is easy. With all the AI coming into our lives these days, a lot of things genuinely are turning into a piece of cake! Or take ‘break a leg’, said before a performance, nobody wants anyone’s leg broken, it’s simply wishing them the very best for a smashing show. English can be a confusing language if you don’t know these phrases, and ‘down the rabbit hole’ is very much one of them. It means slipping into something bizarre, disorienting, or unexpectedly absorbing, a quick task that somehow swallows hours of your day, or turns one small errand into a string of tasks you never bargained for.

A common example is what people call the ‘wiki spiral’. You look up one small fact on Wikipedia, and three hours later you’re reading about life in outer space, with absolutely no memory of how you got there.

Where does the phrase come from? It goes back to the opening chapter of Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the chapter is literally titled ‘Down the Rabbit-Hole’. Most of us read this story as children and remember the bones of it, Alice, bored and drowsy by a riverbank, spots a White Rabbit checking his pocket watch and muttering that he’s late, and follows him straight down his burrow. The tunnel goes on like a straight passage for a while and then dips so suddenly that Alice has no time to stop herself before she’s falling down what feels like a very deep well into a chaotic, surreal, endlessly inventive world called Wonderland. For well over a century after the book was published, the phrase stayed mostly literary. It’s really the internet age that gave it new life to day, ‘down the rabbit hole’ has come to describe getting lost somewhere mentally rather than physically in an endless scroll, a string of Google searches, or a topic you can’t stop reading about.

Now, Fellow Mavericks, rabbit holes have a good side and a bad side, and it’s worth talking about both.

Let’s start with the good - curiosity. That relentless ‘why, why, why’ we see in children, and that so many adults have quietly trained themselves out of. I remember an incident at a train station in Mumbai. A small boy, holding both his parents’ hands, watched them cross the railway tracks on foot instead of using the overhead bridge,  they were late and trying to catch a train from another platform. The boy wouldn’t stop asking why. Why are we crossing the tracks? Why not the bridge? Why are we breaking the rule? When is it okay to break a rule? Why are so many other people also crossing? Why isn’t the railway police stopping them? His questions kept coming, and eventually, his parents turned around and took the overhead bridge instead. They realised missing a train mattered far less than the lesson they were about to teach their son. That boy’s curiosity, his refusal to simply accept ‘we’re late’ as an answer, was exactly the kind of rabbit hole worth following.

Now for the bad side. Rabbit holes show up in relationships too, when couples fall into endless arguments, replaying old mistakes on both sides, giving no ground, refusing to just let something go. It’s an over-analysing loop, dragging up the same three-year-old comment or the same slight, again and again, as if repeating it enough times will somehow change what happened. That kind of spiral doesn’t lead anywhere near resolution. It leads to emotional exhaustion, and it can genuinely become toxic, a slow, corrosive habit that wears down even a strong relationship. What helps is self-compassion, the willingness to forgive, and cleaner, more honest communication. Giving grace to yourself and to others is not easy, and yet it may be one of the single most important things you can practice for real peace and harmony at home. The online version of this is just as real,  doom-scrolling, chasing outrage, or falling into a misinformation spiral where every new search only confirms what you already believed. Those rabbit holes rarely make us wiser; they mostly just make us tired.

This is where the Maverick formula comes back in; go with your gut, be true, fall forward. When you’re standing at the edge of one of those relationship rabbit holes, ask your gut a simple question: does this relationship matter to me? If the answer is yes, then be true to that, and choose to fall forward,  leave the rehashing and the spiraling behind, and put your energy into what actually rebuilds trust, not what keeps replaying the hurt. Falling forward doesn’t mean pretending the mistake didn’t happen; it means refusing to let it become the only story you tell. It’s the same instinct, really, that let that little boy’s parents in Mumbai change course; they didn’t keep justifying why they were crossing the tracks, they simply stopped, turned around, and chose the better path. Reconnecting to your gut is what tells you when a rabbit hole is worth exploring, and when it’s time to climb back out.

Now let’s go back to the good kind of rabbit hole, the one where you’re simply curious, exploring for the sake of exploring, with no agenda. Psychologists call this ‘divergent thinking’;  a term coined by the psychologist J.P. Guilford back in 1956. It’s the ability to generate many different ideas or directions from a single starting point, rather than narrowing straight to one answer. It’s random, it’s not necessarily connected to your work, and it’s exactly the mindset that lets you follow whatever sparks your interest.

We’ve encouraged this as a family, and I want to share a recent example, what we ended up calling our ‘trollgrimmage’. Yes, you heard that right; trollgrimmage, part troll hunt, part pilgrimage. Seattle has had its own troll for decades, the Fremont Troll, tucked under the north end of the Aurora Bridge since Halloween of 1990, famously clutching an actual Volkswagen Beetle in one fist. He’s 18 feet tall, built by four local artists out of steel rebar, wire mesh and ferrocement, the same tough, boat-building concrete that’s kept him standing, glaring, and being photographed by millions of visitors for over three decades. But in the fall of 2023, he suddenly got company. Six brand new giant trolls appeared across the Pacific Northwest, the work of the Danish artist Thomas Dambo, a self-described ‘recycle artist’ who has now built well over a hundred of these creatures around the world. We had family visiting, and instead of a conventional itinerary, we decided to go down this rabbit hole together and hunt for every one of them.

What makes Dambo’s trolls so different from Seattle’s original is what they’re made of, and why. Every single troll is built almost entirely from recycled and reclaimed material, old wooden pallets, discarded furniture, water-damaged planks, wine barrels, even scraps other people had simply thrown away; stitched together with driftwood, cedar, fir branches, moss and shells gathered locally. Dambo’s own words stuck with me: ‘In nature, there is no landfill. Nature is circular, everything has a meaning and everything is recycled.’ The trolls in our region stand between roughly twelve and twenty feet tall. To picture that, Fellow Mavericks, take an average six-foot-tall adult, and stack two, sometimes three of them standing on each other’s shoulders. That’s a troll. Some of Dambo’s trolls elsewhere in the world are built even bigger, up to thirty-five or forty feet, which would take six or seven people stacked up just to match. Each one takes hundreds of volunteer hours to build, with local communities, tribes and even school groups pitching in to help construct them.

And every troll has a name and a little story of its own, almost always tied to protecting the land it stands on. Each day of our trollgrimmage had its own little mission. We looked up ferry timings, hidden cafes, island shops, and picnic spots along the way. On Vashon Island, at Point Robinson, we found Oscar the Bird King, the troll the entire Pacific Northwest series is named after, cradling birds in his enormous hands as a nod to protecting the migratory birds of the Salish Sea. Point Robinson also happens to be home to the historic Point Robinson Lighthouse, first lit in 1915 and now on the National Register of Historic Places, so we got a lighthouse and a troll in the same afternoon.   Seattle’s Lincoln Park, we met Bruun Idun, who from her perch in the trees is said to sing to the orcas of the Salish Sea through a hand-carved flute, a Muckleshoot tribal artist, Coyote, actually carved the flute itself, decorated with killer whales, as part of the project’s collaboration with local tribes. Out in Issaquah, tucked between two trees near the Rainier Trail, we found Jakob Two Trees, easy to reach and endlessly popular with families. And in Ballard, standing guard at the entrance to the National Nordic Museum, there’s Frankie Feetsplinter. We met Pia the Peacekeeper on Bainbridge island and enjoyed the scenic ferry ride there and exploring the many artistic shops and most recently we did the trip to Portland and met Ole Bolle, who is peeking into his own red house. 

  It was such a wonderful, unplanned way to spend our days, we talked about the environment, about how much we as a species waste and throw away, about art made entirely from other people’s trash, and mostly, we just spent time together, hopping from island to neighbourhood with no fixed plan beyond ‘let’s go find the next one’. That, Fellow Mavericks, is an example of divergent thinking in action, wandering, following curiosity, letting one simple idea branch out into an entire, unplanned adventure.

And Fellow Mavericks, from divergent thinking eventually comes ‘convergent thinking’, also one of Guilford’s terms, the ability to bring all those scattered threads back together, narrow them down, and focus on the one thing that matters right now. The two aren’t opposites so much as partners, divergent thinking generates the ideas, convergent thinking decides what to do with them. Our trollgrimmage eventually had to converge too, the ferry back home, the school week ahead, the ordinary Tuesday waiting for all of us. But we came back with something we wouldn’t have had otherwise: a shared story, a few new facts about Puget Sound, and a reminder that trash really can become treasure if enough people care to make it so. Fellow Mavericks, nurture your curiosity, do the random thing, research something completely outside your usual lane. You’ll be surprised what shows up. And then, when you’re ready, come back, converge, and get on with what needs doing.

That, Fellow Mavericks, is the Maverick spirit. Go with your gut. Be true. Fall forward. Every single time.

Do write to me about your own rabbit hole journeys, I would genuinely love to hear from you. You can reach me at theordinarymaverick@gmail.com and follow along on Instagram at #theordinarymaverick.

This is Ajey, signing off and wishing you an amazing day. Keep well.

This podcast series was put together as a team effort from the Bhardwaj family. Concept, design, title, researchers and reviewers: Ajey, Sanjana, Avantika and Niharika Bhardwaj; Script — Sanjana; Cover design — Niharika. All rights reserved.