Cutting the cheese (A short story about what you eat)
Note to the reader: you can take this however you would like. There are many different ways to interpret this story. I believe that it applies to various aspects of life that we all struggle with from time to time.
Once upon a time, there were four mice. Each of the mice were a little bit different from each other. One of the mice only ate peanuts, and as such he was considered the mouse that ate peanuts. The second mouse only ate almonds, and so she was considered the mouse that ate almonds. The third mouse ate acorns exclusively, and he was regarded as the mouse that only ate acorns. The fourth mouse only ate cheese and the others referred to her as the mouse that ate cheese.
The first mouse would look for peanuts all day, take peanuts home to his nest, and eat them. Everyone else saw him rushing about eating his peanuts and they talked to each other.
“He chases peanuts and eats them every day! He’s a peanut eating mouse.” And they all carried on with there day. The first mouse of course could hear the other mice chattering among themselves and was always very excited that they were talking about him, for he respected the others very much.
The second mouse ran about looking for almonds most days, and she was quite happy to be doing it. The others would look at her and say, “She chases almonds each and every day, she’s an almond eating mouse!” And she was happy that they were talking about her and that she fit in.
The third mouse was the same. He was perfectly happy to eat his acorns and fit into his category.
The fourth mouse, whom ate only cheese, was also very happy to fit into her category. The only problem with this was that the other mice all ate nuts. So of course, this set the fourth mouse apart from the others. There weren’t many mice in the forest that ate cheese. Most of them didn’t even know what cheese was. And the others criticized the cheese-eating mouse. The topic of conversation about the cheese-eating mouse would go something like this: “She eats cheese, that’s so gross!”, “Why isn’t she eating nuts like the rest of us?”, “What’s her problem? Does she think that she’s better than us because she likes something else, she’s always chasing something different than us!”
The fourth mouse, of course, could hear what the others said. She would think about it sometimes, but she didn’t dwell on it too much. She loved to eat her cheese, she knew that the others didn’t understand. If they’d ever tried the cheese, she believed that they would all begin to eat cheese just as she did.
As the days and weeks went by, the other mice slowly began to ignore the mouse who ate cheese. She wasn’t invited to the nut eating parties with the other mice, and they talked about her only when referencing a joke or when they laughed.
The fourth mouse felt very left out. And it’s only because I eat cheese she thought. They all think that I’m very different from them, they believe that I’m quite odd. And so it was that the fourth mouse began to eat some acorns here, and some peanuts there. It went on like this until her whole diet consisted on only nuts. After a while, the other mice around her began to notice this change in her behavior.
They began to talk to her more, and to invite her to the occasional party. She enjoyed being with the others, but it wasn’t quite the same. She ate the nuts just as everyone else, but she missed cheese. She missed the smell of cheese, and the thought of cheese, and eating cheese. She would have gone back to eating cheese all the time, but she rather enjoyed being with others that ate nuts. They all ate their separate kinds of nuts, none of them venturing to try the other varieties, but they somehow got along. The fourth mouse wondered why she couldn’t eat cheese without being different.
One day, the fourth mouse was out on a walk with the other mice when they came upon a block of cheese. The other mice had never seen a block of cheese this big before and they became curious. The fourth mouse was extremely excited, because it had been a long time since she’d had cheese. She encouraged them all to eat it, and even ate some herself while her friends skeptically watched. The other mice thought “This is a lot of food, and it looks interesting!” The three nut-eating mice all tried a bit of the cheese and found that, in fact, the cheese was delicious! “Why haven’t we ever tried cheese before?!” They exclaimed, and proceeded to carry some of the cheese home.
After that, the other mice ate cheese with the nuts, and even began to branch out and eat other nuts as well. Several of them even added berries to their diets! They had realized that other foods were excellent as well, and they apologized to the fourth mouse for excluding her because of her diet. They began to make friends with the other mice whom had a very diverse diet, and found that many of the other mice had gone through the same struggles with friendship as they had.
Several weeks later, the mice were sitting around a big pile of acorns, cheese, peanuts, almonds, raspberries, and much much more when they began to talk. They thought about when they were small and they would play together and enjoy each others company. They didn’t separate into their groups and talk about each other. They all ate nuts and roots and went to all sorts of parties. As the mice continued to talk, they realized that as they got older they each found their own interests. They began to change as they each pursued their own devices and struggled to find out what they enjoyed in the world. In their struggle to find their own identity, they had decided that their way was the only way to go about doing things.
When they realized how much they had missed out on in the past years by only eating what they thought was good, they were all a bit sad for a a moment. Then the fourth mouse chipped in to remind them of something spectacular, “We may have missed out on a lot of things, myself included, but we have a wonderful future to look forward to with many new wonderful foods to try!”. The mice were overjoyed at the news, and went on to try hundreds of wonderful foods in their life and enjoyed many new things. When an opportunity came their way, they took it. When someone different than them came along, they tried to understand them. That’s not to say that the mice were always perfect, but they did their best and lived wonderful lives.
The end.
To me, this story is about breaking out of the boxes that others put us in, and showing that we can all not only learn from each other, but that we are all going to be different in this world. It’s how we deal with those differences and about how we accept others that will show how successful we are.
Thank you for the read. If you enjoyed that article or it struck a chord with you, please leave a recommend, subscribe, and share it with others. You can also visit my blog and check out my other stories here on Medium. Feel free to leave a comment or shoot me a personal message on Twitter (Mark J. Force
If you enjoyed reading that, here are a couple others you might enjoy:
The “Devaluization” of human life part 2 — How we devalue others around us in our daily lives
The Threshold of Twenty — The ways that others try to push us into their own categories and keep us there
