I moved your cheese - 1. Seeking and Finding

 It is not easy being a lazy person in today's world. Mind you, this is in face true of almost every age. The bustling mob has no appreciation of the effort it takes to be idle. It demands patience and application and a stubborn refusal to listen to reason. Only we will ever know what discipline and dedication is required to further our art. It is out burden to bear alone, alas, alas. The bustling mob has no appreciation of the effort it takes to be idle. It demands patience and application and a stubborn refusal to listen to reason.

Still, today we are assailed ever more ruthlessly with the injunction to make ourselves better - to look better, to tell the truth more often, to drink less, to be one with the angels.

Once when I was younger and more active, I too turned to the world to seek the secret of a more perfect life. I travelled to South America, to Chile and the hot wastes of the Atacama desert, where I heard tell of a wise man who lived in the mountains. I couldn't miss him, the locals said, pointing to a narrow footpath that led up between the bleached-white rocks into the o'er-looming crags. He was old and bearded and would probably appear on top of a rock and pelt me with mangoes when I got to the really steep part.

"where does he find mangoes in the middle of the desert?" I asked. The locals lowered their gaze and drew patterns in the sand with their toes.

"The old man of the mountains works in mysterious ways," they said.

So i packed a knapsack and a waterproof jacket and headed for the hills. It was hot and dry, but that is what you expect of a desert. When I reached the really steep part, I pulled the waterproof jacket over my head. No one likes to be pelted with mangoes. But as I climbed higher and higher up the really steep part, I couldn't help noticing that the old man of the mountains had not appeared. How was I to find the old man of the mountains, if he wasn't going to attack me with sun-ripened tropical fruit? And this was the first piece of wisdom the old man of the mountains taught me:

I was expecting the worst, but now that the worst has not arrived, I am disappointed. I am the architect of my own dismay.

Actually, that was the second piece of wisdom. The first was :

If you are climbing the really steep part of a mountain with a waterproof jacket over your head, you cannot see where you are going and consequently it should come as no surprise if you bark your shin on a rock.

So i removed my waterproof jacket from my head, and as i stood rubbing my shin I saw that before me was a rocky ledge, and sitting there, legs crossed and eyes closed, was a ragged old man with a long ragged beard. I gasped and dropped to his feet, partly from reverence, partly because it had been a long climb in the thin air and none of the locals had wanted to sell me any coca leaves. When the dry heaves stopped, I thought of this important life lesson:

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 wrote it in the sand with my finger, in case I forgot it later.

I wasn't sure how to approach the old man of the mountains. His eyes were still closed and his breathing was deep and regular, as in common with mountains sages and also didgeridoo players. I reached out a trembling hand and tugged at the hem of his loincloth.

The old man of the mountains gave a little start and a snuffle and opened his eyes. They were molten and golden, like brimming cups of bourbon, He raised his eyes unto the sky and uttered these words: "What the hell?"

"I am your humble pilgrim," I said, rubbing my hair against his feet.

"How did you get up the really steep part without me hearing you?" demanded the old man of the mountains, kicking me in the head.

I was startled, but not shocked. Ragged old sages can be notoriously prickly. My good friend Chunko once visited a sage in the steaming jungles of Laos who lost his temper after a game of backgammon and beat Chunko about the head and shoulders with a length of bamboo, and also with a brick. " Sometimes," says Chunko sadly, "sages have to teach you the hard way."

Meanwhile, i was scrawling another life lesson in the dust with my forefinger:

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 old man of the mountains in a mufled voice, "if you let me up I'll answer your question."

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

"How," I ashed, "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 game me a piece of cactus to chew on. At the time I thought: 'If this man is so wise, who 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 drug.

"So u ate the cactus and number of extraordinary things happened. I was vouchsafed a vision of the inner working 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 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 and 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 ashed.

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

"But what about being a sage?" I persisted.

"Oh that," he shrugged. "I had been up here 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 food stuffs, 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 traveling sales man 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." The old man of the mountains tapped his nose and winked. "Everybody has to have a gimmick," he said.


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 my self: "Sod it. I', 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 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 the white letters.

The book was subtitled: Ten lesson 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.

End of chapter 1

Book by 

DARREL BRISTOW-BOVEY 

I moved your cheese - Introduction

This is not another self-help book. It really isn't. I wouldn't do that to you. Self-help books are damaging to the self-esteem. Self-help books are like diets, or the gym contract some bastard relative gave you for your birthday: they promise to help you, but really they mock you. They build up your expectations, and then they leave you feeling low and craven and flinching at loud noises and sudden movements. Self-help books are damaging to the self-esstem. They promise to help you but really they mock you.


Like diets and gym contracts, self- help books offer the illusion that you can do something to significantly improve yourself - you can become slimmer, wiser, more attractive to air hostesses or that guy who works in the accounts department and rides a motorbike on weekends. You will draw upon yourself good fortune and the golden blessing of universe that looks on you and is well pleased with what it sees. Self-help books lift you aloft on the wings of hope and then, when you have failed once more, they drop you like a losing lottery ticket, face-down like a piece of buttered toast.

Self-help books, to the brief, are no good, and the reason is plain: they expect you to do all the work. Taken to its logical conclusion, a self-help book would be a collection of blank pages and a pen. (A proposal, incidentally, which sadly found scant favour with my publisher when first I pitched it. I even brought my own sheaf of foolscap and a ballpoint pen which I stole when singing the security register in the downstairs lobby. "Look," I said persuasively "I can already give you the manuscript." Publishers, alas, are made of sterner stuff.)

No matter how quick and easy they promise to be, self-help books have the common failing of requiring you to put in some effort. The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, say, may seem to have achieved the astonishing feat of condensing several millennia of accumulated cultural learning into seven convenient bite-sized chunks, like so many KFC nuggets of deep-fried wisdom, but you are still expected to memorise the laws, or at least scribble them down on the back of your hand, and them, I suppose, do something about them. This is the fundamental truth that writers of self-help books overlook: if we were capable or even likely to do these things for ourselves, we wouldn't need their poxy books.

If you are like me - and deep down I think you are - you aren't mad keen on working hard to improve yourself. Human beings are a little like Liberia or the Durban beach-front of London's Millennium Dome: there is not really a lot you can do to make them fundamentally better. By the time you realise there's a problem, there's not much else for it but to tear it all down and start over again. Speaking for myself - and i hasten to point out that I am neither the Durban beachfront not Liberia, although on occasion certain so-called friends have pointed out all alleged physical similarity to the Millennium Dome - that all seems like a little too much trouble.

I am here to tell you that that is okay. Don't be ashamed; say it with me : We are lazy, we are idle, we are downright inert, and we don't give a damn, We are the secret truth of society the bedrock upon which any decent civilization is built. We are the yawning majority who can't quite believe that firming up our bellies and becoming nicer human beings really will be worth the kind of effort demanded of us. We have always been here, and we will be here a long time after the fanatical self-improvers have shuffled off to their just rewards. Say it with me: we are lazy, we are idle, we are downright inert, and we don't give a damn.

What's more, we have nothing of which to be ashamed. We are the best part of this tawdry world. You don't see us invading neighbouring countries or launching political parties. None of us invented boy bands or cellphones that ring with the theme tune from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. We couldn't be bothered. We just want the quiet life. We want to eat well, live well, have sex with attractive people. perhaps drive a fast car on the open road while drinking a beer, but we are not prepared to bend the laws of nature to do it. We prefer to slipstream in evolution's wake.

If it weren't for us, this world would be a bleaker place. We are, for instance, solely responsible for almost every item of dinner-party conversation worth gearing. The snappy aphorism, the casual item of waspish gossip, the - if you will pardon the expression - bon mot were all invented by people like us: people interested in maximum effect for minimum effort. If it weren't for us, it would be all personal trainers and striving toward the light and embracing change and similar appalling notions. We are interested in none of that. If it weren't for us, this world would implode from boredom.

Of course, this is no reason to get complacent. Like the stegosaurus or the fondue set with matching forks (which, let no one tell you different, is not cool and never will be again), if we fail to adapt to the changing times, we are doomed to extinction. We will be banished to the back of the kitchen cupboard Steven Spielberg will make movies about us. We need to learn to stay attractive to our mates, to stay wealthy and healthy and secretly to thrive, that we might pass out genes to the generations that follow slouching in our shadow. Like the stegosaurus or the fondue set with matching forks, if we fail to adapt to the changing times, we are doomed to extinction.

That is why I have written this book. If you want to take three easy steps to being a fabulous person with a wonderful life, close this book immediately. This is not the book for you (although you should feel free to buy several copies for your friends). This is the self-help book for people who want to take no steps at all. This is the self-help book for people lying on the sofa. This book will tell you how to reap the rewards of being a better person, without having to trouble yourself with the unnecessary burden of actually becoming better.

(It is not even necessary to read this book. Simply buying it and keeping it displated in a prominent position will make you brighter, happier and more desirable. Our pages have been treated with a revolutionary new formula that allows wisdom, through a process we have patented under the name Osmatix™, to pass directly from the page into the atmosphere, where it can easily be inhaled from a reclining position. In countries of the northern hemisphere it is characterized by the slight odour of stilton.


If you would like to take advantage of this unique opportunity, we have provided a number of blank pages at the back of this book. Besides making a book look thicker on the shelves, these pages will allow you to pretend to be reading - at the beach, perhaps, or on public transport - while in fact giving you the opportunity to rest your eyes and think about last night's episode of Sex and the City.


Alas, however, if you are planning to share this book with your life-partner or members of your immediate family or your colleagues at work, it is my duty to inform you that osmatix™ is highly sophisticated compound. Like a gosling newly hatched, it bonds and imprints itself to the particular chemical properties of whoever first opens this book and breathes its heady scent. The Osmatix™ of this book will work for you, and you alone. Your husband or your secretary will just have to buy their own copy. This obviously is bad news for you, but good news for us. In fact, to members of the publishing industry, the smell of Osmatix™ resembles nothing so much as newly folded money.)

So follow me, brothers and sisters, into a brave - well, bravish - new world. A world, at any rate, in which our cowardice is well hidden. And as we go, remember our mantra. Whisper it to your self. Print it on a card and keep it prominently displayed on your refrigerator door or the dashboard of your car. Have it tattooed inside your eyelids, so that you can read it while you take your afternoon nap. if you like, you can strip to the waist, take out your drums and chant the mantra to the steady pulse-beat of your throbbing bongos. (Although if you do choose to go the half-naked drumming route, I must ask you to go down to the bottom of the gardon and crouch in the shrubbery where decent folk can't see you.)

Do you have the mantra ready? Do you? Oh sorry, I thought i had told you already. Our mantra is: "Anything can be faked." you can add any ohms and ahs and ululations you might require, but that is the gist of it: anything can be faked. Our mantra is: "Anything can be faked." 

(Except insincerity, I suppose. It is difficult to fake insincerity. And having bad hard; that is something that can't be faked. You either have bad hair or you don't, I'm afraid But other than these things, the mantra holds pretty much true.)


Are we ready now? Are we? Right, follow me.

End of introduction

Book by

DARREL BRISTOW-BOVEY

 

I moved your cheese - Summary

The problem with the self-help books that litter the shelves of the bookstores and bedside tables of the nation, besides the fact that they are poorly written by unattractive authors, is that they expect you to do all the work. You are required to read them, remember key words, perhaps even put their teachings into practice in everyday life.

Not this self-help book. This is the self-help book for people who want to take no steps at all. This is the self-help book for people lying on the sofa. This book will tell you how to reap the rewards of being a better person, without having to trouble yourself with the unnecessary burden of actually becoming better.

It is not even necessary to read this book. Simply buying it and keeping it displayed in a prominent position will make you a brighter, happier and more desirable person. Our pages have been treated with a revolutionary new formula that allows wisdom, through a process we have patented under the name "Osmatix"™, to pass directly from the page into the atmosphere, where it can be easily inhale from a reclining position.

Award-wining columnist Darrel Bristow-Bovey had adapted the insights from a multitude of self-help book. Before they may have appeared to be a shameless procession of old codswallop, but this book reveals the shining truth in all things. 

End of Summary

Book by

DARREL BRISTOW-BOVEY