I Moved Your Cheese

by Darrel Bristow-Bovey

  5

  Who Moved My Keys?

  By now you are no doubt turning to your partner, who is I trust lying in bed beside you with his or her own personal copy of I Moved Your Cheese, and asking: “Say, why is this book called I Moved Your Cheese? I haven’t seen much sign of cheese, and why would anyone want to move it anyway? What gives?”

  The answer is not, as certain cynics and sceptics have already cruelly suggested within earshot, that we are hoping by a cheap ruse to cash in on the popularity of a recent bestselling book in the self-help genre. Not at all. The answer to your question will, I hope, become clear in due course. Just give that Osmatix™ time to work.

  Meanwhile, I would like to offer some words of counsel on the subject of coping with change. Coping with change is a hot topic at the moment, and I think I understand your anxieties. If you are anything like me – and if you have read this far, I think you are – the kind of change that most disturbs and annoys you is one that each morning causes you to throw back your head and bellow: “Who moved my keys?”

  Because let’s be honest with ourselves: we are not much concerned with the big changes. Your company, which once specialised in manufacturing hula-hoops specifically designed for left-handed people, is being pressured by market forces to diversify into making security gates? Well boo-hoo. You either roll with it or you stay at home and become an alcoholic and watch Days of Our Lives until you remember that you have always wanted to become a fashion designer or maybe a porn star. That is your destiny, and unless you are an utter dunderhead with no capacity to think more than five minutes ahead – and I am confident that you are not – there is nothing that anyone can tell you that will make very much difference.

  But it is not the big things that cause the real stress. It is the little things, like dashing for the door to beat the morning rush-hour traffic and discovering – wouldn’t you know it? – that someone has moved your keys again. Seriously, it happens all the time. I put my keys down where I can be sure to find them – like in the pocket of the trousers I was wearing yesterday, or between the cushions on the couch or, if I have worked really late the night before, in the freezer section of the refrigerator, next to the ice-trays – and in the morning, without fail, I can never find them again. Someone has moved my keys!

  This causes stress. What causes even more stress is when my partner says: “I’ve told you a hundred times to hang the keys up on the hook for the keys. Then you will always know where they are when you’re trying to leave.”

  And of course I have to say, “I don’t have a hook for keys. Have you ever seen a hook for keys? No, that’s because I don’t have one.”

  And then she will say: “Well, you should have one. Anyway, look at me; I never have any trouble finding my keys.”

  Then that causes me to take even longer to leave, because of course now, besides finding my own keys, I have to surreptitiously look for my partner’s keys, and hide them somewhere she won’t easily find them, without her noticing that I am doing it. That’s right: I move her keys.

  (It is, of course, a useless plan. Women have a supernatural gift not given to men. Women can find things you have lost with barely a blink or a scratch, the way a drug-sniffer dog at an international airport can find biltong in your backpack, or the way a Cape Town waiter can without hesitation pick out the sole out-of-towner in a party of eight and unerringly bring him the wrong order.)

  It is no good telling me, as well you might, that I shouldn’t sweat the small stuff. Sweating the small stuff is what makes us function normally. If we didn’t get depressed that our team lost the cricket on Saturday, we would have all that capacity for depression just lying around, waiting to attach itself to something big, like global warming or the commercial hunting of minke whales or the ongoing commercial success of Eminem.

  If my partner weren’t sitting with her girlfriends on a Saturday morning, drinking cappuccino and saying: “And you know what I can’t stand? I can’t stand the way he never puts his keys down in the same place when he gets home”, she would be freed up to be saying: “And you know what I can’t stand? I can’t stand the way he always goes out in the morning, pretending he has a job, when really I know that he goes down to the Chalk ’n Cue and wins money from people who bet that he can’t sing the theme song to Ally McBeal while simultaneously smoking a cigarette and downing a tankard of beer.”

  But of course, the keys are not necessarily keys. They might also be one half of my pair of lucky green socks, or my cigarette lighter, or that last beer that I could have sworn I left in the crisper section of the refrigerator, cunningly hidden under the head of lettuce that has been there since 1998, but which I keep around especially for the purpose of hiding my last beer. For some reason, all of these things go missing too.

  No matter. I say to you: Embrace the little irritations. Little irritations can be solved, and they keep your mind away from the big issues, which are just going to bog you down and depress you and about which you will never really be able to do anything meaningful.

  But I realise that it is customary to offer these lessons in the form of useful parables. Let’s say – and again I must emphasise that I am not thinking of any best-selling self-help book in particular here – that there are four little characters who live in a maze.

  Two of them are mice, because mice live in mazes, and the other two are tiny little people, roughly the size of mice. That may seem unrealistic to you. Too bad. The little people and the mice are all very happy at the beginning of this parable, because they have a regular supply of cheese. Ah, cheese.

  But then one day they wake up and discover that there is no more cheese. The two mice, being mice, head off into the maze and find some new cheese – although I suspect it was really the same old cheese that someone had moved to a different place. The two little people, being people, I suppose, sit around and complain and try to figure out what has happened to their cheese.

  Now you might think that the moral of this story is: Embrace change; adapt yourself to the new circumstances of cheeselessness; go into the maze and find your cheese. But you would be wrong. That is the mouse’s way of going about things.

  Tell me, my brothers: are we mice or men? Because the real question is: who did move my keys? (Or, in the case of the parable, cheese?) Because if there is a serial cheese-mover on the loose, he or she is unlikely to stop at once. Having acquired the taste for moving cheese, there is nothing to stop them moving it again and again – and again, if they are not stopped – all the while snickering up their sleeve at your discomfort.

  If you insist on scuttling after the cheese, you are inviting yourself into a world of hurt. Remember Xam and his desert elephant? Think of the desert elephant as the cheese. You could go trudging after that desert cheese all year, and when you found it you might still not know what to do with it. If you can’t find your cheese, move on to something else. Find something else that you can pretend is important. Pretending it is important will make it so. It is not the objective that counts, but your success in finding it. Enough with the cheese already.

  Remember: objectives can be shifted; success can be manufactured. Anything can be faked.

  But back to the parable. As I say, the little people’s reaction was quite correct – the thing to do is to find out who did move your cheese. Because if you can find them, you can tie them up and poke them with sharp objects until they tell you where the cheese is. And then you can get them to go steal the mice’s cheese and bring it to you.

  Which is why, whenever I can’t find my keys in the morning and my partner is rattling on about how it is somehow my fault, I find it is a useful strategy to stand in the middle of the lounge yelling: “Who moved my keys? Damn it, did you move my keys?”

  If you do that long enough, she will forget about blaming you and she will stalk through, take one look around the room and find your keys in the bottom of the fishtank, where you left them last night when you arrived home late, thoughtfully anticipating that
in a glass-sided fishtank they would be in plain sight from anywhere in the lounge. Then she will point to them with a stern finger and say in a voice steeped and simmered with sarcasm: “Yes, that’s right, Darrel. I moved your keys!”

  I don’t care. She can be as sarcastic as she likes. At least she has stopped blaming me. And even better: I have my keys!

  Now that I have my keys and I have some time to think, I wonder if my mouse analogy was really all that helpful. Or even if it had anything to do with the point I was trying to make. Between you and me, I may not be all that good at this simple-minded-analogy business. Anyone who bought this book hoping for some help with coming to terms with being retrenched from the left-handed hula-hoop factory is probably going to be sitting there now tearing out the pages and using them as cocktail napkins or absorbent kitchen wipes. He’s going to be calling up his other retrenched buddies and saying, “Say, have you fellows read I Moved Your Cheese? You have? What say we go over to that bastard’s house and clean his clock for him? I’ll bring the sandbags and the rubber gloves. What’s that? Why am I talking in an American accent? Am I? Sorry, I hadn’t noticed.”

  This is obviously not the defence I will use if several disgruntled out-of-work middle-management types come knocking on my door, but my opinion on the matter is simple: if you really need me or anyone else to spin you a feeble yarn with such electrifying insights as: “Change happens” and “You should adapt to change when it happens” and “If you don’t move with change you will be left behind”, then frankly you didn’t deserve your job in the first place. And for the sake of the economy, you shouldn’t be given another one.

  This is my advice on coping with change: keep a small jar on the kitchen counter in which, each night when you get home, once you have hidden your keys, you deposit the larger of your loose coins. I suggest you donate small coppers to the needy or unload them on car guards. I often do that, which might explain why my car radio keeps getting stolen. My good friend Chunko keeps his spare change in an old rugby sock, which he keeps under his pillow for self-protection in the night. He needs it: Chunko’s wife still hasn’t forgiven him for trying to pick up severe-looking women in the supermarket.

  Remember: change is inevitable, but unless you manage it well, it will make the coin section of your wallet stretch and will cause an unsightly bulge in your trousers.

  6

  Being and Nothingness

  A great source of anxiety for young people making their way in the world today is the mindless advice that is regularly rolled out – like a length of artificial lawn – by professional advice-givers and well-meaning but misguided friends and relatives.

  Advice is very much like the low-impact aerobic skiing machine you bought from a late-night infomercial – you hang on to it for a while, not really paying it much attention, then you pass it along to someone else. It is the only thing to do with advice and aerobic skiing machines, because you never actually use them yourself.

  There is an awful lot of bad advice knocking about. For instance, there is that whole cultural reservoir of frankly puzzling hand-me-down wisdom that has been loitering about for centuries, being rightfully ignored then punted ahead like a rusted soup can for the next generation to pick up, ignore, then punt ahead in their turn.

  Why, for instance, do we insist on declaring that a stitch in time saves nine, rather than, as recent studies seem to suggest, a number closer to seven-and-a-half? And what thinking parent would voluntarily tell their child that a watched pot never boils? That is the quickest way to shatter the myth of parental infallibility. All the little tyke needs is a pot, some water, a heat source and a pair of eyes, and soon he will know that you are all busk and bunkum, just like your parents before you.

  Nor does the falsehood end there. Unless he is irretrievably drunk, he who laughs last, far from laughing longest, usually stops abruptly with an embarrassed look on his face. The next time you are tempted to solemnly intone that a rolling stone gathers no moss, take a gander at Keith Richards’ teeth. What’s more, I would be very surprised if the rain in Spain really does stay mainly on the plains. Does Spain even have plains? Bulls, yes, and haciendas, and women in red skirts, but I have never noticed any plains. Perhaps I have been looking in the wrong places.

  I don’t suppose it really matters what the meteorological profile of Spain is – unless of course you happen to be an itinerant Spanish umbrella salesman looking to unload your stock – but my point is that people throw around that sort of casual counsel with merry disregard for the truth. How many times has someone said to you: “Cheer up. Things can only get better”? This sort of bare-cheeked dishonesty is nothing short of insulting. If things have one common property upon which we can all agree, it is surely that they can always get worse. Given half a chance, things deteriorate faster than the second half of a Jim Carrey movie.

  Another piece of advice that has me clucking and tutting at its sheer muddle-headed wrongness is the one that goes: “Always be yourself.” Have you ever heard anything so appalling? Civilisation and all standards of human decency are precisely predicated on us not being ourselves. Haven’t you ever read Lord of the Flies? Or tussled with another person for the last parking space at the mall? Underneath our glossy hairstyles, we are animals.

  Even leaving aside the nature–nurture debate, being yourself is fraught with peril. Most of us, deep down, are sneaking, skulking, sometimes snivelling scaredy-cats, emotionally ambivalent, morally tenuous and possessed of a hidden liking for certain kinds of popular music that we would not under any circumstances reveal in public. Why should we be that person? In a world of people who seem rather more interesting than we are, why should we be stuck with ourselves? If being yourself were so great, there’d be queues of people wanting to be you.

  What makes the advice worse is that it is usually being offered to someone who has conclusively demonstrated that themself is precisely the wrong person to be in that particular situation. If you have asked a girl to your matric dance and she has not only rejected you out of hand but insisted on singing a mocking song that rhymes aloud her opinion that you are not merely physically unattractive but also have a distasteful personality and many annoying habits, I think the message you should be getting is that if you want her to go to the dance with you, “yourself” is the very last thing you should continue to be.

  Even worse is how people say “Be yourself” without so much as a moment’s consideration of whom they are addressing. I am haunted by mental images of the young Jeffrey Dahmer approaching the school guidance counsellor with a couple of questions about certain troubling dreams he’d been having lately, and the counsellor nodding and frowning while really thinking about a beer and his afternoon nap, and telling him: “My best advice to you, young man, is to always be yourself.”

  So the crux of what I’m saying is: Don’t feel you have to always be yourself. Be someone else if necessary. For instance, if you are Slobodan Milosevic, be someone who isn’t a genocidal villain. If you are George W. Bush … but no, I promised myself no more George W. Bush jokes in this book.

  I am not suggesting, mind, that you attempt to improve yourself. Oh no. That takes time and effort, almost invariably doesn’t work, and still leaves you stuck with being you. Just be someone else for a while. This world is too varied to allow you to persist successfully with being only one person. “I am large,” said Walt Whitman, “I contain multitudes.” At least I think it was Walt Whitman. Or it might have been Goldfinger, in that scene where Sean Connery is strapped to the table with the laser beam.

  If you are just a run-of-the-mill slob, with no special talents or burning interests, well, join the club. There are billions of us, with many more behind us and trillions still to come. In fact, it is my considered opinion that in the history of the world there have only been seven or eight unique or original people, and everyone else just tries to imitate one or more of them, with varying degrees of success. (I know you are expecting me to reveal who those people
are, but I am too wily an author for that. I will say, however, that none of them is John Lennon. Or Shirley MacLaine. Or anyone with whom you or I are personally acquainted.)

  If you have mastered the art of handling your ostrich egg, you will by now have realised that all things are possible. Which is to say: all things can be faked. You can be anyone you want to be.

  BEING OPRAH

  “You can be anyone you want to be.” As I wrote those words I realised they sounded familiar. Then I remembered: I hear them on Oprah all the time. Oprah is fond of telling you that you can be anyone you want to be, no matter how poor, downtrodden or black-in-a-southern-state-of-the-USA you are. This is because, by telling you that, she is reminding you that she was once poor, downtrodden and black-in-asouthern-state-of-the-USA, but now she has more money than there are catfish in the Louisiana bayou.

  In fact, to hear Oprah talk about it, you would think that she only escaped her childhood by buttering up her wrists, slipping them from the manacles and fleeing the chain-gang just before she and her sisters were loaded onto a paddle-steamer to be sold up the Mississippi, Simon Legree lashing at their bloodied shoulders with a rawhide bullwhip. I keep wanting to remind Oprah that she only acted in an Alice Walker story; she didn’t actually live there.

  Oprah has a segment on her show called “Remember your spirit”. Now what on earth does that mean? Are you going to find yourself on a hiking trek in the mountains, going through your backpack in your tent in the evening, saying, “Let’s see now, flashlight, waterproof matches, snake repellant, groundsheet … say, where’s my spirit? Dang, I’ve forgotten my spirit again. WHO MOVED MY SPIRIT?!”