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BOOK: Who moved my cheese?
Ah change. Oh how we dread it. Just when we are comfortable with the way things are, something happens. In his book Who Moved My Cheese?, Spencer Johnson, M.D., in the simplest of ways, shows how change should be dealt with. The self-help book is the “for teenagers” version of the bestseller for grownups by the same title.
The book opens with a gathering of seven friends at lunchtime in the school cafeteria. Melanie, Peter, Kerry, Ana, Carl and Josh are pretty upset about the school’s new schedule but Chris seems to have readily accepted it. When the others want to know the reason behind his being so comfortable with it, he laughs and tells them a story his uncle told him — the story of Who Moved My Cheese?.
It’s about four characters, Sniff, Scurry, Hem and Haw, who run through a maze searching for cheese. “Cheese” is a metaphor for whatever is important to us in our lives. Sniff and Scurry are mice and Hem and Haw are Littlepeople — beings the size of mice but who behave very much like normal people.
The four are happy and comfortable with the cheese they have found in the maze. All return to it each day to have some but none think ahead to the reality that nothing lasts forever. When the cheese is gone, the mice readily accept the change without making much ado about. They sniff and scurry about the maze looking for new cheese elsewhere. Meanwhile the Littlepeople, Hem and Haw, cry over their loss and ponder over who could have removed their cheese. They spend days in depression till Haw decides to also follow the mice’s example and go looking for new cheese. This is how he too accepts change and the challenges that come with it.
The lesson is simple. One should also change when things do. But something so simple is sometimes very difficult to understand. That’s where this book comes in. A nice story and a valuable lesson, it will forever change you and the way you look at things.
Available at Paramount Books
96pp. Rs695
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