"Who Moved My Cheese"

I just finished the book “Who moved my Cheese” by Spenser Johnson. This book was so riveting that I could not stop myself to write about it. I have read many inspirational books but this book seemed very realistic to me. It is a simple parable that reveals profound truths. It is an amusing and enlightening story of four characters that live in a “maze” and looking for “cheese” to nourish them and make them happy. Two are mice named Sniff and Scurry and two are “Little People”-being the size of mice that look and act like people. Their names are Hem and Haw.Sniff had the habit to sniff out the situation and see the changes early,Scurry liked to go into action immediately,Hem wanted to stay in familiar territory of misery and Haw was realistic to accept the change and find solution.

“Cheese” is a metaphor for what we want to have in life-whether it is a good job, of loving relationship, money, a possession or spiritual peace of mind. And the “maze” is where you look for what you want-the organization you work in, or the family or company you live in. In the story, the characters face with unexpected changes, which of course they did not like. Eventually one of them deals with the situation, comes out of it successfully, and shares his experiences with us.

The one important thing, which also confirmed my belief that we human beings think about many useless things that, is irrelevant most of the time. Like the mice in the story ,the two little people ,Hem and Haw ,also used their ability to think and learn from their past experiences .However ,they relied on their complex brains to develop more sophisticated methods of finding cheese. When we were kids, we did not have so complex brain and we were like monkeys.

Remember how we used to learn new words when we were kids? We would just listen to our elders and copy them shamelessly without thinking much, or for that reason for learning any thing new. We would just copy our elders or do what our elders say and learn it. We only knew that if we worked hard, repeat few times and we can learn. Without getting ashamed of as what others will think if, we say it wrong, we would just speak up, just say it and just do it.

However now that we have grown up and we want to learn any thing new, we try to think with our complex brain as how we can learn certain things in less time, we always try to find new tricks to learn instead of just get into the situation, work hard with it and find a solution. We do lots of planning before we try to solve the problem. Some times the tricks work but most of the time in hope of that trick or that easy way out, we get so much stuck in our problem that we never come out of that problem for the rest of our lives. Some times, we do well, but at other times, our powerful human beliefs and emotions take over and cloud the way we look at things. It makes life in Maze more complicated and challenging As a result, in the end we just give up or start to live miserably.

As we grow up, we become so sophisticated that we have hard time realizing our own fault. We always try to put the responsibility of failure on some one else and live in delusional life. Where as the right way is to realize and laugh at our stupidity. We will change as soon as we learn to laugh at our selves and what we have been doing wrong and then quickly move on.

The best clue I got from the story is that we do not try to change and we have to pay price for that. We feel entitled to our “Cheese”. We feel like victims when it is taken away and blame others.