In the country on the other side of the looking-glass, there lived a queen called the Red Queen. She was always very busy. She walked very fast. She gave very many orders. She had a great deal to do, and not enough time to do it in, and she was, at every moment of every day, in something of a hurry.
Alice met her one afternoon in a great open field at the edge of a chess-board garden. The Red Queen took Alice by the hand without asking. The Queen began to run.
"Faster!" said the Red Queen, gripping Alice's hand tightly. "Faster, Alice! Faster!"
Alice tried to keep up. The trees on either side of the path went past very quickly. Or perhaps they did not go past at all. Alice could not quite tell. She ran until her lungs hurt, and her legs hurt, and her hand hurt where the Queen was holding it.
Then, all at once, the Queen stopped. Alice nearly fell over.
Alice looked around. They were standing in exactly the same place they had started.
"Why," said Alice, when she could breathe again, "we are just where we were! We have not moved at all!"
"Of course not," said the Red Queen. "Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that."
Alice thought this was extraordinarily tiring. She said so.
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PART II
The Red Queen
in which a queen pauses
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The Red Queen let go of Alice's hand. She stood very straight, the way she always stood, with her chin up and her shoulders back. But she did not start running again.
She looked at Alice for a long while.
"You think it is exhausting," said the Queen. Her voice was not the booming voice she used for proclamations. It was smaller. "The running."
"Is it not?" said Alice.
The Queen did not answer for a moment. She looked at her own hands. She straightened her crown, which did not need straightening, the way people sometimes adjust things when they are deciding whether to say something.
"There was a time," said the Red Queen at last, "when things were different. Slower. Manageable. I do not remember it very clearly. I am not sure when it stopped being like that."
She looked at Alice with an expression Alice had not expected to see on the face of a queen.
"I stopped paying attention for a moment. Only a moment, I think. And in that moment, everything shifted just enough that I had to run to catch up. And then I never quite did. So I ran faster. And then faster. And here I am."
She paused.
"If I stopped now," said the Queen quietly, "I do not know how far behind I would be. And I think I would rather not know."
Alice thought about this. She had met a great many strange things in Wonderland and beyond it. But she thought this might be the saddest. A queen who had been running for so long she could no longer remember what she was running toward.
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PART III
The Red Queen
in which a garden is remembered
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They stood in the field. Neither of them ran. The trees were the same trees. The chess-board garden was in the distance, with its alternating squares of black and white.
"When you stop running," said the Red Queen, in the voice she had been using lately, the one that was not booming, "you see all the things you ran past without noticing. The people who were trying to say something to you. The places you were in the middle of, that you left too early."
She looked at the chess-board garden in the distance.
"I ran past a garden once. A real garden. With roses in it. They might have been red, or they might have been white. The gardeners were always painting them, so it is hard to say. I meant to go back. I had every intention of going back."
"Did you?" asked Alice.
"No," said the Queen. "There was always something faster to run toward."
"What do you think was in the garden?" Alice asked.
"I do not know," said the Queen. And that was the whole of her answer, and the most honest thing the Queen had ever said to anyone.
Alice thought about the garden. She thought about all the things the Queen had run past. She thought about the people in her own life who were always very busy. The ones who never had time. The ones who said they would visit when things settled down, and never did.
"The fastest people I know," said the Queen, in the tone of someone offering a piece of information that had cost her something, "are the ones who are afraid of what they will think about if they are still. They keep moving so the thoughts cannot catch them."
"But the thoughts are there whether you are moving or not," said Alice.
"Yes," said the Queen. "But when you are running, you have an excuse not to deal with them. You can say: I would, but I have to run."
She looked at Alice with an expression that was very nearly not at all queenly.
"You are quite perceptive," said the Queen, "for someone so small. It is a little unnerving."
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PART IV
The Red Queen
in which a queen looks at a tree
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Alice did not know what made her do it. Perhaps it was the garden the Queen had mentioned. Perhaps it was the afternoon, which was a particularly slow sort of afternoon. Perhaps it was just that she was tired.
Alice stopped. Completely. She let go of any thought of running. She stood still in the field, and she looked at the tree nearest to them.
The Red Queen stopped too. Not because she meant to. Only because Alice had stopped, and had not started again.
"We are still in the same place," Alice said, slowly. "Look. The tree is the same tree it was when we started. But I can see it properly now. It is rather a nice tree, when you look at it."
The Red Queen looked at the tree.
She looked at it for a long time. Longer than she had looked at anything in many years. Her shoulders went down a little. Her hands, which had been ready to seize Alice's hand again, fell to her sides.
"Yes," said the Queen at last, in a voice that was quieter than any voice Alice had heard her use. "It is rather a nice tree. I never noticed that before."
They stood there in the field, the Red Queen and Alice, looking at one tree. They stood there for a minute. They stood there for two minutes. The world did not end. The kingdom did not collapse. The chess pieces, in the distance, did not fall over. The tree was simply a tree, in the quiet, being looked at properly, for the first time in a very long time.
When Alice walked away later, the Red Queen did not follow her. She did not run. She stayed where she was, in the field, looking at the tree.
Alice never did find out whether the Red Queen went back to her garden. She thought, on balance, that the Queen probably did. She seemed, at the end, like somebody who was one nice tree away from deciding that some things were worth stopping for.
A long time before the Red Queen, Jesus visited the home of two sisters, Mary and Martha. Martha was running. Jesus said something to her the Queen would have understood. Would you like to hear it?
A TEACHING OF JESUS
Jesus once told a busy woman named Martha that she was worried about a great many things, but that only one thing was needed.
The Red Queen had forgotten how to choose the one thing.
What is the one thing you might choose, if you stopped running for a moment?
Martha was running, the way the Red Queen was running. She had a great deal to do. She was busy preparing food and arranging things and being a good host to Jesus, who was visiting her house. Her sister Mary was just sitting on the floor, listening to him talk. Martha was annoyed. Martha was tired.
She came in and asked Jesus to tell Mary to get up and help her. Jesus did not tell Mary to get up. He looked at Martha, gently, and he said: Martha, Martha, you are worried about a great many things. But there is only one thing that is needed. Mary has chosen that one thing. I will not take it from her.
The Red Queen had been running a very long time. She had forgotten how to choose the one thing. Alice stopped. She looked at a tree. The Queen, for the first time in many years, chose to look too.
What are you running toward right now? What would happen if you stopped, just for two minutes, and looked at one nice tree?
LUKE 10:41-42
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"It is rather a nice tree. I never noticed that before."
I worked sixty-hour weeks for thirty years. I told myself it was for my family. I missed my son's little-league games. I missed my daughter's graduation. I told myself I would make it up to them later, when things settled down. Things never settled down. I retired at sixty-two. The first month was the worst month of my life. I did not know what to do with myself. I sat in my house and I felt the thoughts I had been outrunning catch up with me. All of them. All at once. My daughter called me. She said, "Dad, do you want to come for a walk with me on Saturday?" I went. We did not say much. We walked around her neighborhood. She showed me the trees she liked. Real trees, that I had been driving past for forty years and never looked at. We walk every Saturday now. The Red Queen had to stop running before she could see her tree. So did I. It took me a very long time. But I am here now. And the trees are very nice, when you look at them properly.
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, Tom, 67, Tucson
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there is another story about somebody who ran a very long way, and then stopped, and went home, and found that home had been waiting for him the whole time.
it is the story of the Prodigal Son.