I Moved Your Cheese

by Darrel Bristow-Bovey

  Do not be afraid of discovering that your idols have feet of clay. If they have clay feet, it won’t hurt so much when they kick you in the head.

  Happily, the old man of the mountains soon stopped kicking me in the head. He settled back to catch some more shut-eye. “Master,” I implored, “I am your servant.”

  “If you’re my servant,” he said, adjusting his loincloth, “go keep an eye open for any more pilgrims coming up the path. I have a week’s supply of mangoes, and I don’t want them to spoil.”

  “But Master,” I said, “I am here to learn from you.” He tried to kick me in the head again, but I seized his leg and twisted it and wrestled him to the ground. It was an awkward situation, of course, but there was nothing for it but to keep going, pausing only to write this life lesson in the sand:

  Wisdom does not drop from the sky like mangoes. Sometimes you need to wrestle with wisdom and put it in a half-nelson. Do not be afraid of wrestling with wisdom: if it has been sitting cross-legged on a mountaintop for any considerable length of time, it will probably be slightly malnourished and easily manhandled.

  “Okay, okay,” said the old man of the mountains in a muffled voice, “if you let me up I’ll answer your questions.”

  So we sat facing each other, and an air of great calm settled between us.

  “How,” I asked, “does one become a wise old man of the mountains?”

  He shrugged and sniffed and swished his beard in the air. “Not much to it,” he said, and told this story:

  “I was a young man, much like yourself, seeking enlightenment. I met a man who claimed to be Carlos Castaneda, although looking back, I realise it might have been Carlos Santana. Everybody said he was a very wise man and played a nifty guitar, and he gave me a piece of cactus to chew on. At the time I thought: ‘If this man is so wise, why doesn’t he remove the thorns from the cactus before chewing it?’, but I was young then, and easily swayed by the offer of hallucinogenic drugs.

  “So I ate the cactus and a number of extraordinary things happened. I was vouchsafed a vision of the inner workings of life and eternity. I scribbled it down in the sand with my forefinger, because I knew I would forget later, but you know how it goes with scribbling things in the sand. It’s all very well, but you can’t take it with you.

  “And then, once the vision of the inner workings of life and eternity had passed, it was replaced by a sharp-toothed demon visiting me in the guise of Snoopy.”

  I had to interrupt. “Snoopy?” I said.

  “Yes, Snoopy. He’s not as innocent as he looks, that dog. Snoopy chased me, and I fled. I fled from Central America. I fled with that hound of hell at my heels, until finally I fetched up here. By that time, I don’t know, I guess the cactus had worn off. Snoopy had vanished. But I was pretty tired, as you can imagine, so I decided to rest up a spell. Rental is not as cheap as you would imagine in Chile, so I found this rocky ledge and here I am. It’s comfortable enough, except when it rains and when rattlesnakes come looking for warmth and try to curl up in my armpits on chilly nights.”

  “Does it rain much?” I asked.

  “Not for the last twenty years,” he said, with the smug look of a man who has invested wisely in real estate.

  “But what about being a sage?” I persisted.

  “Oh, that,” he shrugged. “I had been up here a while, eating the eggs from a condor nest and wondering what I should do next. I was thinking of going down to Patagonia to write a travel book, or maybe New York to try my hand at musical comedy, when I heard a commotion from below. Three locals came clambering up carrying a basket of foodstuffs, including a big wheel of llama cheese. I do love llama cheese.”

  “Really?” I said. “I find it too tangy.”

  “Not at all, kid. You need to learn to appreciate cheese. Anyway, they gave me that food in return for any words of wisdom I might have. I told them I didn’t really have any, and offered to recite the first two verses of ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ instead. They nodded and bowed, so I did. Then they went away, nudging each other with their elbows. And then I realised they didn’t speak English. But it didn’t seem to matter. Each day different villagers came to visit, carrying a basket of foodstuffs, and they would sit and listen to ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’, or sometimes, if I was in the mood, the Beatles’ ‘Ob-la-di Ob-la-da’.”

  I nodded at his tale, and as I nodded I wrote this life lesson in the sand:

  Sometimes it is not necessary to learn wisdom by being taught wisdom. Sometimes it is enough merely to be in the proximity of wisdom. Sometimes wisdom doesn’t even have to make sense.

  But to tell you the truth, I was getting a little tired of writing down these life lessons. And I was beginning to doubt the wisdom of listening much longer to the wise old man of the mountains. I was ready to go. “One last thing,” I said. “Why the mangoes?”

  The old man of the mountains tapped his nose and winked. “Everybody has to have a gimmick,” he said. “There’s a travelling salesman who makes deliveries once a week. He comes up the back way, so the locals can’t see him. There’s actually a road back there – he just drives on up in his Peugeot. He’s trying to persuade me to switch to papaya. They are more expensive, but they are squishier; plus he can supply me with canned papaya, which keeps for longer.”

  I nodded and slowly set off down the long path to the world below. I had a bad feeling that I knew what was going to happen next. I was right. He had a good arm for a raggedy old man – he had beaned me with four papayas and what felt like a yam before I was even halfway down the really steep part. I couldn’t really blame him, I suppose – no one likes being put in a half-nelson – but I do wish he had taken the papayas out of their cans first.

  FOOTNOTE

  How I wish that were the end of the story. Sadly it is not. I roamed the world for some years, seeking wisdom in a more and more desultory fashion, until one day, swaying in a hammock on a squid fishing boat being lashed by a monsoon in the South China Sea, I thought to myself: “Sod it. I’m going home. It’s warm there, and I can watch television.”

  So I bought my ticket. But as I stood in the airport book-shop, waiting for my flight to be called, my eye happened to alight on the best-seller rack. And on the rack was a book, and on the cover of the book was the photograph of a man’s face. Hang about! I thought. I know that face!

  And I did know that face, although the last time I had seen it, it had been rather more grimy and streaked with dirt from being on the wrong end of a half-nelson. The book was titled Go Tell It on the Mountain, and on the cover it had a little red sticker in the shape of a star, with the words “Over one million copies sold” written in white letters.

  The book was subtitled: Ten lessons learnt from a life more perfect. I could scarcely bring myself to open it, but I did. The first chapter began with these words:

  “If we are not afraid of tropical fruits falling on our heads, we will be better able to see the riches in front of us.”

  I closed the book and caught my flight, and I memorised this final life lesson, which I shall never write in the sand, and which I shall never forget:

  If you have no wisdom of your own, reading self-help books will not help you. You will have to write them instead.

  2

  Finding Your Egg

  Gurus on mountain tops, you will have gathered, are no good for our purposes. They are no good for anyone’s purposes, come to that, but for the lazy person they are worse than useless. Even if he is actually a guru, rather than a nut without a razor living rent-free in the wilderness, it is so much trouble trying to find him that by the time you get there all you want is a beer and a taxi back home again. Fortunately, I have a story close to hand that tells us all we need to know.

  Listen now to this tale. It is a simple tale, but one, I think we can agree, that speaks to our innermost hearts. What’s more, it incorporates ancient folklore and the wisdom of a vanishing culture, which I understand is very fashionable nowadays.

 
It is a story from the indigenous peoples of southern Africa. You might call them the Bushmen, or you might call them the San, or you might call them by the name they use, although if you do that, neither of us will be able to spell or pronounce it, so we won’t really know what we’re talking about. Whatever their name nowadays, they are the oldest people of a very old continent, and they know a thing or two.

  I was told this tale by a very wizened fellow wearing a cloak of antelope hide who sat next to me on a Greyhound bus. He wore nothing else besides his antelope-hide cloak, which made for awkward moments and a reluctance on my part to squeeze past him to go to the bathroom. Besides a severely distended bladder, the wizened old fellow gave me this gift of wisdom – a gift I have shared with many others over the years. They found it helpful, and I think you will too.

  THE STORY OF THE EGG

  Many moons, and moons of moons, ago, when the animals still covered the land and humans roamed free, there was a young man named Xam. That was really his name – Xam.

  Xam was young but he was a good hunter. He could track an ostrich across a gravel plain with his loincloth tied over his eyes, which always impressed the girls, and he was a dab hand with a blow-dart. At night he would lie awake and purse his lips and make short, sharp exhalations of breath. When his mother said: “What are you doing over there?” he would reply: “I am practising my blow-darting technique.”

  And she would say: “Well, just you keep your hands above the animal-hide blanket, where I can see them.”

  Xam dreamed of hunting the desert elephant, for he believed that only when a young hunter had tracked and killed the mighty desert elephant would he truly be a man.

  Does this sound familiar to you? Have you lain awake and dreamt of hunting the desert elephant? Do you still lie awake and purse your lips and make short, sharp exhalations of breath? Of course, your desert elephant might not have been an actual desert elephant. A desert elephant, we can safely say without ruining the ending, is a metaphor. Perhaps you lived nowhere near the desert. Perhaps your elephant was a luxury German sedan. Perhaps it was success, fame and the admiration of your peers. Perhaps it was Mrs Dunstable, your form five History teacher. There are as many desert elephants as there are types of cheese. More, probably.

  One day some of the older boys came to Xam and said: “We are leaving to track the desert elephant. We will be away for many days and nights. We want you to come with us. You are a dab hand with a blow-dart; plus you never know when we might meet a gravel plain and an ostrich, although if you don’t mind we’d rather you leave your loincloth where it is.”

  And Xam was overjoyed, and he went to ask permission of his mother. And his mother said: “No.”

  So Xam said: “All right, in that case can I spend the night with my friend Xab in his family’s cave?”

  And his mother said: “All right, but if you only return in a month’s time, dragging a desert elephant behind you, you are going to be in big trouble, my boy.”

  But of course Xam joined the older boys and they set off on their journey to track the mighty desert elephant. They travelled light, as people did in those days, and as we would too if we didn’t have pockets, but they did carry ostrich eggs that had been emptied out and filled with water and bunged up again with small sticks and wadded bits of animal hide. Animal hide was big with Xam’s tribe. We use plastic – they used animal hide. Along the way, across the wide sandy wastes, they would each bury their ostrich eggs, one a day, and leave small markers in the sand.

  Is this like your life? Do you leave behind important items, perhaps even important people, in the expectation that one day you will meet up with them again? Do you? Really? What sort of markers do you use? I have been thinking about it, and I can’t quite figure out how the markers fit in with that analogy. But I couldn’t leave them out, because, as we shall see, the markers are an important part of the story.

  Because he had left home in a hurry, Xam had brought only one ostrich eggshell – a great big one, which he buried beneath a baobab tree.

  The boys were away a long time, treading the hot sands of the African desert, and they only stopped when they reached the sea, and even then they had waded in a little way before someone suggested it was time to turn back.

  One day, on the way back, they saw the tracks of the mighty desert elephant, and they set off in pursuit. They walked and walked, following the tracks. A few days later, one of the older boys cleared his throat and tapped Xam on the shoulder. “Are you sure we’re walking the right way?” he said. They all stopped and looked at each other.

  “What do you mean?” said Xam, a little defensively.

  “I mean,” said the older boy, “are we sure we know which side of a desert elephant’s footprint is the front bit, and which part is the back bit?”

  They all looked at each other again, then they all looked at Xam. Xam looked at the footprint. “Well …” he said slowly, but then he stopped, because he didn’t really know what else to say.

  “Have you ever seen the track of the desert elephant before?” demanded the older boys.

  Xam, who had kind of assumed that someone else had been leading the way, looked slowly down at the sand again, and said, “Weeellll …”

  There followed an ugly scene, involving some scrapping and kicking and biting and – though I am sorry to say so – swearing. At the end of it, they began the long walk back home. “We could always follow the wild elephant tracks back the other way,” someone suggested under his breath, but everyone was glad he didn’t repeat it.

  Has this ever happened to you? Have you followed your desert elephant into the wilds, only to discover that when you stop to think about it, you don’t know whether you are coming or going? Yes? Then did your friends beat you up? No? Good. You have chosen your friends wisely.

  So they walked into the great, wide, brown desert. They crossed a gravel plain, and Xam could swear that he could make out the three-toed print of a desert ostrich. He looked up and was about to say something, but he noticed the older boys were all watching him with dark looks on their faces, so he closed his mouth again.

  Every so often one of the older boys would recognise a small heap of stones or a twisted piece of wood, and scramble over the sand to dig up the egg that he had buried. Each time he would glug back the water himself, or share it with a friend. No one ever shared his water with Xam. Xam lived off the moisture he squeezed from small lizards and scorpions, which was fine, but not the same as a cooling eggshell of water. Besides, it is no fun, squeezing the moisture from a scorpion. They don’t wriggle as much as the lizards, but they have very bad tempers. Xam thought about his mother waiting for him back at the cave, and he began to wish he hadn’t come.

  Then, as they reached the hottest, most barren part of the desert, they discovered that a great sandstorm had passed that way, covering everything in a carpet of fine brown earth. The markers were all hidden, and no one could find their ostrich eggs any more. So they walked and they walked, and each day the sun blazed more warm.

  One morning, Xam saw in the distance the scraggly arms and branches of a baobab tree. It was his baobab tree. He trotted across the hot sands and knelt at its foot and dug and dug until he found the great big egg he had brought from home. But when he lifted the egg, he noticed that it was lighter than it had been before. Soon he realised why: his plug of stick and animal hide had worked its way loose, and all the water had spilled from the egg and run out into the fine desert sand.

  I am guessing this has happened to you. It has happened to me. Haven’t we all, at some time or another, failed to chew the piece of animal hide long enough to properly soften it, so that it falls out of our ostrich egg at the worst possible moment? I think we have. But wait – this is the important bit. Watch and see how Xam handles the situation.

  Xam was unhappy at finding no water, but he didn’t want his companions to mock him and slap him around more than they already had. So he carefully replaced the plug of stick and animal hide,
and carried the egg back to the others. They all looked at him, expecting him to throw back his head and suck on the egg, but instead he just tucked it under his arm and, saying nothing, fell in step beside them.

  And so they walked, and the others kept watching Xam out of the corners of their eyes, waiting for him to take a sip. But he never did. Occasionally he would shift the egg from one arm to the other, as though the weight were becoming too much, but he never said a word and he never took a sip.

  And the others began to wonder at this. They wondered: Why isn’t he drinking from that great big ostrich egg? And one said: “Maybe he knows something we don’t. Maybe he knows that we are far from home without any water, and he will need that ostrich egg to get him home safely across the wide wastes of the desert.”

  And another said: “Maybe he is being noble. Maybe he is refusing to drink his water while we go thirsty.”

  And another said: “Maybe he is waiting to share his water with us when we all need it most.”

  And all of them were thinking: “Maybe if I am nice to him, he will give me some of that water. I want some of that water.”

  And so they began to behave differently towards Xam. They started speaking to him again, and sharing their morsels of dried antelope meat, and they helped him catch lizards and scorpions and squeeze the moisture from them. And one of the older boys said: “When we get home how would you like to date my sister? She’s a lot younger than she looks.”

  They even offered to carry his ostrich egg for him, but Xam, sorry elephant tracker though he might be, was no fool and he always politely declined. And the more he kept silent, the more the others became convinced that he kept a mighty secret indeed.

  And so by the time they reached home, the rest of the community noticed how the older boys hung on Xam’s every word and click. They noticed how the older boys would share their food with him and offer to sweep away the hard rocks and little jagged bits of quartz before he lay down to sleep each night. They noticed these and many such things, and their respect for Xam grew. In due course and with the passing of time, Xam became the most respected and powerful man in the community.