The Cheese and Change



Who’s moved my cheese?

Both mice and dwarfs wonder, but the former start to look about for new cheese while the latter begin to curse and complain, indulging themselves in the memory of the old days enjoying the cheese at will, at leisure.

As the cheese is a symbol of goal and happiness, the loss of cheese represents a change, a challenge, and a chance the mice quickly accept and instinctively adapt to by changing their pattern of life. What about the dwarfs? Eventually they follow suit by searching new cheese, too, but late and reluctant.

The importance of attitude towards the cheese and change is well illustrated by this thought-provoking parable, by the choice of the mice with their instinct and intuition as well as by the choice of the dwarfs with their senses and reason.

What is your attitude when you have your cheese or when you suddenly lose it?

You can’t wait for the new cheese in the old room as the dwarfs do, but go all out through the maze of life to venture, discover.

Those smart mice can smell the change of cheese before it goes sour but the dwarfs seem to pay no attention to the cheese’s decrease or any sign of on-coming changes until it disappears all of suddenly one day.

The proverb is always inspiring: there is no fire without smoke, and there is no smoke without wind, have you smelt anything new and special in the wind, in the air?

Playing chess, you must know what next three steps for you to take, guess your rival’s reactions and your counter measures like what “Top Secret:1950”, a TV film series clearly and dramatically show: you’d enter his mind and world, understand his character and strategy, think in his logic as well as play his role to achieve the goal “Knowing your rival, knowing yourself”, something also similar to the Japanese detective stories in which the master detective is able to imagine and visualize almost everything conceived or done by criminals.

As there are various types of cheese for you to search and discover, so many changes for you face and cope with, a flexible attitude plus a sensible strategy will undoubtedly be a better solution.

So are you ready for the cheese and change?

(September 15, 2009)