I Moved Your Cheese Read online

  a) during a fishing expedition

  b) at your mate Kevin’s stag party, especially if you have to point yourself out as being “the one with the bucket on my head”

  c) at any occasion at which you happen to be wearing short pants. Unless you are raising the Rugby World Cup in triumph with Nelson Mandela patting you on the shoulder, avoid visual representations of yourself in short pants.

  It is, however, acceptable to leave visible a framed photograph of yourself receiving the Academy Award or the Nobel Peace Prize, especially if it is turned slightly towards the wall to suggest modesty, and especially if you respond to her query by saying, “Oh that”, and shrugging with a distantly amused smile playing at your lips. But only if you have really won an Academy Award or the Nobel Peace Prize. None of those hilarious fake newspaper front-pages saying “[Insert name here] wins Grand Prix of belching” or anything like that.

  Besides, silence and mystery is cool. I would go so far as to say it constitutes coolth. Consider silent men: Steve McQueen, that James Bond villain with steel teeth, The Undertaker on WWF wrestling. Now consider talkative men: Woody Allen, Murray Walker, that guy at the office who likes to discuss how the next Star Wars movie is going to explore Darth Vader’s descent into the dark side. Are you getting the point I am trying to make here?

  Play it smart. When she says: “What are you thinking about?” – and you know she will – consider your response well.

  Don’t say: “I was wondering what you were thinking about.” That is sad, and not at all mysterious.

  Don’t say: “I was thinking about how much I love you”, because this is not only untrue but also devalues one of the last cards you have left to play. One day you will need that card to get out of a mess of sticky trouble, my friend, and you will be grateful you still have it up your sleeve.

  You might get away with saying: “I was thinking about how much I want to rip off your clothes with my teeth and get down to some serious carpet-aardvarking with you”, but be careful what you wish for.

  I would also counsel against honesty here. “I was thinking about what time the game starts on Saturday” or “I was wondering what is making that clinking noise in my engine whenever I drive above a hundred and ten” is simply giving away too much of yourself. Keep it cagey. Don’t answer directly. Instead look out of the window and say: “Isn’t it odd to think that Mozart/Noah/Golda Meir looked up at the very same moon?”

  Do not misunderstand: this is not going to fool her into thinking that you really were musing on the vagaries of time, the flesh and this ever-changing world. It doesn’t matter. Understand clearly: she doesn’t want to know what you’re really thinking. She wants you to provide the blank canvas on which she can paint her deepest dreams of what you might be like. Say it with me, my friends: Embrace your inner ostrich egg.

  4

  Finding Your Inner Mayan

  By now I think we are getting the hang of our inner ostrich eggs. It takes some practice, learning to handle your egg, but when you have mastered it the world lies open and glistening before you. But beware. There is danger ahead. There are those who have not learnt to embrace their inner emptiness. There are those who are so afraid of the egg within that they will stop at nothing to fill it up, and they are not fussy about the filling.

  Be careful, my comrades. The unwary among us will have their ostrich eggs filled with gloop and guff, with flimflam and flapdoodle before they know what’s happening. What am I talking about? I think you know what I am talking about. Walk to your nearest bookstore and take a gander at what is on the shelves. Everywhere you turn there is some new line of hokum and bunkum just waiting to flow into us, like harbour water into a discarded beer can, were we but to give it a chance.

  Each season it is something new. Just recently it was feng shui. Think about that: the big craze of the last while was a range of small and poorly edited books teaching us that our lives will be better if we start arranging our furniture the way they do in China. Now come on. If you were writing a jokey book about the kind of nonsense that people believe these days, you wouldn’t be able to make that stuff up.

  Everywhere you turned, people were hanging mirrors in their hallway, or taking mirrors down from the hallway, I forget which. I met a woman who covered the edges of her coffee table with small blobs of putty because – and I am not making this up – “it makes the corners rounded, which enables the energy to flow freely through the house”. If there is energy flowing freely through your house, you need an electrician, or an exorcist, or a lightning conductor over your mantelpiece, not four blobs of grey-looking putty.

  Besides, what makes the Far Easterners the great experts on achieving success through the wonders of interior design? I wonder if the Japanese Ministry of War had feng shui when the generals got together to cook up that grand Pearl Harbor idea. I wonder if Chairman Mao had arranged the right symmetry of water features and light fittings when he sat up late of a night, sipping cocoa and scribbling down good ideas in his little red notebook:

  1. Send all intellectuals to work in paddy fields.

  2. Beat them up, while we’re about it.

  3. Put up posters of me.

  4. Remember to check that sofa is aligned parallel to lei lines. Or should that be perpendicular? I forget which.

  5. Fetch an intellectual from the paddy fields to write down the principles of sofa-alignment, so I don’t forget next time.

  6. Shoot intellectual in head so that no one knows more about sofa-alignment than me.

  Besides, things are different over there. What works for a Japanese pagoda, say, may not work quite as well for an upmarket townhouse. And take it from me, you don’t want to start building your house like a Japanese pagoda. Have you seen the size of those places? You’ll be forever banging your forehead on the lintel, and leaning against a wall and falling outside because the wall was made of paper. And a national taste for furniture that leaves no room for the La-Z-Boy genuine leatherette recliner, with collapsible mugholder and twice-padded footrest, need expect no favours from me.

  You would have thought we would have learnt our lesson from that whole koi-pond phase, but no. And while I’m on the subject, the next person who looks at me disparagingly when I push aside the chopsticks at an oriental restaurant is going to have a lot more on his plate than he ordered. I’m not going to say this again: the reason we eat with forks is that we long ago discovered that four sharp prongs offer a more efficient means of manipulating food than do two bits of blunt stick. I am not being backward when I eat with a fork – I am using modern technology, damn it.

  But enough of that. There are many such egg-fillers about. I encountered another one just the other day. I was slinking through my local bookstore – perhaps the very store in which you bought this book – when I was accosted by a young lady waving a glossy paperback.

  “Have you read this?” she enthused with a voice like loose change falling from your pocket and rolling down the pavement. “It will change your life. It contains the lost wisdom of the ancient Mayans.” The book was called The Avocado Prophecies or Footprints of the Toucans or some such flummery. I clucked and tutted and fixed her with a stern eye. I have no patience with Loser Chic.

  LOSER CHIC

  Loser Chic is what I call our modern obsession with celebrating the losers of pre-history. Any hodgepodge of antiquated mysticism is celebrated nowadays, provided it can be attributed to the Incas or the Etruscans or any other culture that has disappeared from the face of the earth with scarcely a trace. I don’t get it. Whatever misty romance these people may offer, the fact of the matter is: they lost. In the big boardgame of history, they threw the losing dice.

  Tell me, besides pioneering communal cocaine use and celebrating the social merits of human sacrifice, what can the Inca teach us? How to be invaded by a rag-tag bunch of unshaven Spaniards? If those ancient civilisations were so damned clever, where are they now? Eh? Building pyramids in the jungle is all very well, but they m
ight have found the wheel a touch more useful in the long run.

  (I accept, as I must, that history is long and that one day Fortuna’s wheel will turn and Western culture – however you might conceive it – will one day be eclipsed by the resurgent communities of Burundi or Papua New Guinea. I accept that, and when it happens I won’t expect the triumphant Papua New Guineans to write nostalgic books reminiscing about how the early twenty-first-century West invented Reality Television and expressed their aspirations through the artistic career of Christina Aguilera.)

  The current Losers du Jour are the Mayans. You can’t drink a cappuccino in your local bookstore these days without spilling your foam on another meaty tome celebrating the arcane knowledge and buried insights of the noble Mayans (or Maya, you might prefer to call them). Ooh, how clever they were, and how communal their lifestyle. What lovely buildings they built. Plus, what sharp timekeepers they were – did you know, they built sundials and they knew the movement of the stars?

  Well, of course they knew the movement of the stars! What else are you going to do at night if you’re a Mayan? Watch TV? Read a book?

  The Mayans are especially popular at the moment, because the Mayans predicted the world would come to an end on Sunday, 23 December 2012 – coincidentally, precisely the day my endowment policy matures. But enough about me. After the slight disappointment of the year 2000 and Nostradamus and the new millennium and all, and the fact that Table Mountain didn’t reveal itself to be a flat-topped pyramid that was actually a spaceship that would gather together the spiritually enlightened and take them up to Betelgeuse, the spiritual conspiracy-theorists have been casting about for another big occasion.

  The Mayans have given us 2012, and so 2012 is already shaping up to be the next big communal boo-hoo and brouhaha. And if the Mayans predicted 2012 – no matter that almost everything else they did failed and crumbled back into the jungle – then the Mayans must be a smart bunch of cookies.

  And so we are beset on all sides by chattering voices urging us to reach inside and find the lost wisdom of the Maya, to find the Mayan within. Do not listen, my children. It is a trick to fill your eggshell. More than that – it is just plain dumb. Always remember: we may be lazy, but we are not dumb. It is only the very smart who can get away with being as lazy as we are.

  Let’s have another look at these fabulous Mayans, shall we? Let’s take a closer peek at these models of wisdom and insight. The Mayans, it turns out, had a vibrant sporting culture, similar to our own. Nothing wrong there. They were fond of a particular ball sport, the rules of which are sadly lost to us, mainly because the Mayans didn’t know how to write in a language we can understand. I have a sneaking suspicion that they weren’t that big on rules either.

  On special days, the city would gather round to watch the game, at the conclusion of which the winning team were given a rubdown and a chew of coca leaves, and the losing team were given a sympathetic handshake and put to death. Again, details of the actual execution are sketchy, but there is strong evidence to suggest that part of the winning team’s winnings was the privilege of consuming the stillbeating hearts of the losers. History, alas, doesn’t record what happened to the coach of the losing team.

  No harm done, you might think. We could stand to encourage a little more of the winning culture among our own sportsmen and business executives. Perhaps so, but read on.

  An even more impressive recreational activity was the Mayan enthusiasm for sustained bouts of heavy drinking. With the combination of ingenuity and far-sightedness for which they are today rightly celebrated, they solved the vexing problem of how to continue drinking after the body has had enough.

  Once the vomiting mechanism had kicked in – nowadays a sign to all but the most hard-working member of parliament that it is time to leave the party – they simply whipped out their banana-leaf funnels and continued taking their favourite tipple as an enema. Hence, I suppose, the old Mayan drinking salute, “Bottoms up”.

  (As an historical aside, the old Mayan drinking salute is one of only two authentic Mayan expressions in common use today. The other comes down to us from the prenuptial contract of the first marriage of a Mayan woman to a man from the non-Mayan world. Negotiations were tough, and involved drinking. The contract was prolix, but could be summarised as follows: “What’s Mayan is Mayan, and what’s yours is also Mayan.”)

  So what are we to make of these anthropological facts? What kind of people do the self-helpers expect us to emulate? Murderous sports thugs with a pathological compulsion to drink, that’s what. Well, I have news for you. There are communities of modern-day Mayans all around us. They are called university residences. I lived in one such community for two years, and I wish you could hear the quaver in my voice and see the purple fear in my eyes when I tell you that I don’t want to go back.

  Let me tell you something else about the Mayans. One day, after several thousand years of more-or-less civilisation, they all just upped and abandoned their cities. They gobbled down their last heart, packed away their banana leaves and walked into the jungle, never to return.

  Many theories have been advanced to account for this mass abandonment, including a breakdown of traditional hierarchies of faith and authority, combined with the threat of external invasion. I don’t think so. If you ask me, it wasn’t the fear of attack from outside that made the Maya leave – they were just tired of being Mayans. And after what we have heard today, who could blame them? It wasn’t the enemy without that destroyed their civilisation; it was the enema within.

  My advice on finding your inner Mayan is this: Don’t bother. He will find you when he needs to borrow some money.

  NONSENSICAL CHIC

  It isn’t just Loser Chic that is in vogue. Do not underestimate the determination of the self-helpers and money-spinners to sell you something to fill that inner ostrich egg. They know that most of what they are selling makes no sense, so they make a virtue of how little sense it makes.

  “Every woman is a goddess,”a woman said to me recently. She looked at me with that haughty look that goddesses have. Actually, it was more like the haughty look that llamas have, but I let it pass. She had just been reading a book titled Women Who Run with the Voles While They Wait for the Wolves to Return Their Call. (No, she hadn’t. I just made that up because I wanted to use the word “voles”.)

  “But if every woman is a goddess,” I said slowly, so that I could understand, “then what exactly does it mean to be a goddess? Doesn’t it just mean being like every other woman? Surely the word ‘goddess’ then has no special meaning? If every woman is a goddess, why not just go on calling yourselves women?”

  “You are applying masculine thought processes to a phenomenal experience,” said the goddess. I didn’t know quite how phenomenal I was finding the experience, but I plugged ahead.

  “So surely there must be some room for improvement in this world of goddessness, otherwise what’s the point of all the self-help books you read?” I persisted, feeling a headache coming on. “Are there different levels of goddess? Like, are there maybe normal goddesses, and then someone like you is an advanced goddess?”

  She gave a small toss of her head. “Clearly,” she said, “you do not understand non-rational wisdom.”

  Now that is the kind of person with whom you do not want to have a conversation. If Neale Donald Walsch had written Conversations with a Goddess, and had selected her, he would have sold about four copies. The book would have been no worse than Conversations with God, mind you, but then it is not quality that sells self-help books. I hope.

  My point is that they are celebrating the nonsense of things that make no sense. I don’t know if you’ve ever read a book called All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. I really hope you haven’t. Some dolt named Robert Fulghum used an entire forest of trees to rhapsodise about the emotional appeal of Crayola crayons, and draw life lessons and inspiration from – I am not kidding – the exploits of the Eensy Weensy Spider.

>   He couldn’t be making it more clear: if you read self-help books, he was saying, I can tell you the kind of thing I would tell a four-year-old, and you will be content. The only difference between you and a four-year-old is that you will shell out your hard-earned cash to buy my book.

  I don’t even want to start talking about that other chuck-le-head, Deepak Chopra. When I first heard Deepak Chopra’s name, I thought he was a Los Angeles gangsta rapper. Then I read one of his books, and I realised that stacked up against Deepak Chopra, the life’s work of Tupac Shakur is a model of good sense, sound advice and lyrical beauty. I don’t like to make fun of my fellow writers, but that’s okay, because Deepak Chopra isn’t a fellow writer. Deepak Chopra isn’t a writer’s cuticle.

  Consider this limpid puddle of prose: “But now a stage comes when the seeker is born into the seer. Because the seeker has discovered that that which the seeker was seeking was the seeker, and having sought the seeker, the seeker becomes the seer.”

  Not even the most ardent Chopraphiliac can pretend to enjoy something like that.

  Or think of this: “The only difference between you and tree”, says the perceptive Chopra, “is the informational and energy content of your respective bodies.”

  That is also the only difference between me, a tree and George W. Bush. Hang about – no, that is not the only difference. A tree has leaves, damn it, and sucks up water from the ground, and lets dogs urinate against it. And George W. Bush … actually, I suppose George W. Bush is a little like a tree. Oh, I can’t think any more. When I read too much Deepak, I have to reach for my six-pack.

  Now do you understand why it is so hard to write a book that tries to satirise self-help books? When it comes to the self-help genre, the line between satire and the real thing is drawn in water with a blunt pencil.