In the 50^th chapter of his Essays, the celebrated English Lord Chancellor and philosopher, Francis Bacon (1561 – 1621), wrote: Some books are to be tested, others are to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. Right now, I’m very sure of one of the few books to be chewed and digested: Who moved my Cheese? – By Dr. Spencer Johnson. I believe you’ve done Tuesdays with Morrie (by Mitch Albom) already, because it’s one hell of a must-read. Those who have read it are saying beautiful things about it already… Suffice it to say that Who moved my Cheese? is at par with Tuesdays with Morrie; Albom and Johnson killed it!

Yes, Who moved my Cheese? is quite a book; as interesting as it very name. It is a simple but profoundly awesome story. Borrowing from Apple’s Steve Jobs, it’s insanely great. And I immediately wish to thank Obinna Udeh for lending me his copy – & I already returned it.

Don’t panic about size. It is even way smaller than Tuesdays and can be read all up in an hour, less or just a little more.

About content, Dr. Johnson simply told a simple but amazing story, a story better read yourself than having me narrate it here. This story elegantly captured the No. 1 thing at the very heart of life and social dynamics: CHANGE. And the real thriller in Who moved my Cheese? is that its only four characters – Sniff, Scurry, Hem and Haw – represent, in one way or the other, especially with respect to response to change, each and every one of the more than 7 billion human beings on the planet.

As it were, Who moved my Cheese? is the case of a book really mirroring and convicting and/or commending the reader while he/she reads. In fact, you’ve not truly read this book until you’ve found yourself in one of the characters.

amazon.com is always a great place to find books; check Who moved my Cheese? there. If you can’t afford amazon.com, then do a free Google PDF download – it’s there; I checked. If both don’t apply to you, then inbox me: ndubuisi.cornel@gmail.com – I’d gladly help, because helping you reach your peak is my business.

I can be such a weird dude at times. Imagine that I went for a friend’s father’s burial and what I spent most of my time there doing was write. I didn’t even have my writing pad with me; had to make do with the plain inside back cover of the burial brochure. Somehow, I thank God she didn’t catch me doing that. Even if she did, I wouldn’t have cared much because it was an urge I couldn’t resist. It was way too compelling, and it seemed that her late father was dictating to me what I was writing.

 The 12 Revelations

1. Beauty is vain; looks fade
2. No one is indispensible; Life goes on.
3. The grave humbles everyone – both the lowly and the highly get 6 feet
4. One’s good name is the best legacy – not cash or real estate
5. At death, enemies will rejoice, friends will mourn
6. Life is transient; everything passes away
7. Most mourners will showcase their best pretense ever – as if they loved you that much, as if they were always there for you, like they were your true friends.
8. The one in the coffin is the homilist for the day; others are, at best, commentators
9. It’s a day of regrets for everyone – what they wish they did for you, what they wish they said to you, but didn’t. The dead fellow even has more regrets – wishing they loved more, wishing they cared more, wishing they did more.
10. At death, one loses, another gains. Nigerian Yar’adua’s death saw Jonathan become president.
11. Death gets everyone philosophizing. Raising, as it were, fundamental questions, like: What is the meaning of life? What is the value of things?
12. Uncertainty looms! Most times, things just happen!

 The 10 Lessons

1. Simplify. Simplify! In fact, be notoriously and sophisticatedly simple. To say the least, complexity ain’t worth one bit of the value we accord it.
2. Devote the rest of your entire life building the true legacy: a great name. I didn’t see an account balance, number of cars and houses on the funeral oration. Everybody was just talking about the personality.
3. Humble yourself. We’re all already 6 feet down, only awaiting delivery.
4. Don’t pride looks/appearance beyond necessity. True to it, looking good is good business, but an exaggeration of it is something else. It only serves to make us feel great and to leave a good impression of ourselves on others. That’s all! It’s never an end in itself, which is why you shouldn’t be obsessed about it. Shun narcissism! And refrain from making value judgments and derogatory remarks about people based on their looks.
5. A good question to always ask oneself, from the stables of Robin Sharma, is: Who will cry when I die? Try playing your burial scene in your head >> look at the faces of family, friends, fans, foes, strangers who only got to hear about you after you’d died, etc., in that mental scene.
6. Relate with life as it truly is: transient. Refrain from holding onto people, things, and positions too tightly. Relish the moment, but be open to change whenever it comes calling.
7. Be an everyday philosopher, not a situational philosopher. Always confront yourself with the real questions, the basic questions, the fundamental questions, and then order your life accordingly.
8. You’re important. At most, very important. However, you’re not indispensible. Life just rolls on with or without you. All humans can observe a minute silence for you, but Big Ben can’t afford a second standstill. Never forget this one.
9. Do it now! To avoid regrets at the end, now is the right time to do whatever you wish for yourself and for others.
10. Finally, since uncertainty looms, always have your house in order. You really don’t need an alarm clock for this one.

No doubt, this piece is going to be one of the millions of pieces that would be published on various media today on the subject of what we celebrate – Valentine. The newspapers and the magazines must say something; bloggers and nearly everyone on the various social media platforms will say something, too. To say the least, the Facebook posts and twitter tweets will alone run into hundreds of millions, covering features ranging from an exposé on the heroic virtues showcased by St. Valentine, through pieces of ‘free advice’ on the ideal way to run the day, to wishing their significant others happy Val’s day. And so, I’m not sure of writing something special here, but I’m pretty sure I will be writing something pretty different.

Today, I choose to retell a story: The oldest story in the world. The story of boy meets girl and the world stops moving. The story of how it always starts, irrespective of however it may possibly end. It is quite a story, and one we could all, in one way or the other, identify with. It is the story of Pure Love, and we find its very first expression in the first man, Adam.

We may not fully under this story until we travel back in time to Genesis, the very beginning. Imagine Eden. Imagine the assortment of animals and the variety of flowers. Imagine Adam seated there all alone, the only one of his kind; how else would he have found companionship with the animals or be fully satisfied with the banquet of rich food and choicest wines. Yes, in the midst of many he was all alone; in the midst of plenty yet so hungry. He didn’t even know what to expect or ask for until God his God came to the rescue, uttering these fine words: It is not good for man to be alone.

The climax of this story resides where the woman shows up. We can at least isolate two facts here: One, Adam didn’t know she was made with the bone taken from him, for he was not just asleep but was made to sleep deep! Two, Eve’s nakedness didn’t strike any cord in him, for they didn’t yet know about their nakedness until after the Fall. With these facts in mind, two questions are expedient: How come Adam knew she was taken out of him – “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh!”? How come Adam made such a terrific exclamation, as if he knew what he wanted all along?

I’m not Adam, and I surely wasn’t there with him when the presence of Woman electrified his being, but I know what happened to him: He felt it! This episode reveals that intuition, as a source of knowledge has always been at work, and is as old as Woman. It was intuition that told Adam that she had been taken out of him – that like produces like. It was also intuition that told Adam that Woman was all he needed all along but didn’t know. This intuition is LOVE. Little wonder someone defined love thus: Love is the feeling that you feel when you feel a feeling you’ve never felt before.

Commenting on this story, the oldest story in the world, Scott Hahn submitted that before the Woman Eden was only a garden, turning into Paradise with her coming. And in one way or the other, all those in pure love can identify with this oldest story. When boy meets girl, that girl that fits what only his intuition knows, earth stops moving.

Today, better than any other day, we celebrate this story, and I choose to retell it, The Oldest Story in the World, and the very story of our love. We especially thank Fr. Valentine, of sacrificial memory, for giving us a reason for this celebration and retelling.

Aside the fact that we don’t ‘originally’ choose such status as gender, race, and sexual orientation, we get to spend our entire lives making choices. ‘Originally’ leans against the backdrop that we are now even capable of altering some of those seeming natural choices via the likes of transgender and homosexuality. People can now even choose a different skin colour or identify with a different race. In fact, the one thing we just can’t stop doing is choice-making. Funnily enough, even the hesitation to make a choice is already a choice.

What is more, we appear to hold our power of choice sacred. Deny a man that right, for instance, and he could transform into a monster overnight. Even daddy’s little girl grows up too; it gets to the point where her own way is the only way that makes sense her. She’s bold to remind all those who think she was born yesterday that she’s come of age to run her own shows both by herself and on her own terms. And she holds especially sacred the choice of her ‘Mr. Right’ and would take it personal with anyone – just about anyone – who dares to get in her way.

Our seeming obsession with choice-making is both the child and an expression of a bigger obsession – FREEDOM. And this would inform why ‘self-determination’ is the first fundamental human right, which is dressed under the cloak of ‘right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’.

However, there is a big problem. And this is it: our understanding of choice and freedom is not just shallow but annoying. This shallowness draws from the fact that we have more often than not related with those concepts solely from the standpoint of pleasure, and this one-sidedness lands us into interpreting freedom as license. Cowed by pleasure-mindedness, we choose without consequences in mind; we exercise freedom divorced of responsibility. Too bad.

Be that as it may, our power of choice, which is the expression of freedom, is the best thing that has happened to our species. But to make choice and freedom worthwhile, we must construe them holistically and relate with them truly. We must not just choose for the fun of choosing; we must make informed and right choices. Yes, for a choice to be informed, we must understudy and then evaluate the implications/consequences of the said choice. For instance, being in the know that premarital sex can pave way for pregnancy, STDs/STIs and the likes, would significantly inform the choice of indulgence or abstinence. More so, we’re moral beings and imbued with the mechanisms to relate with right and wrong. And so, our choices also need to be right – not wrong.

On freedom; it is not license. The hallmark of freedom is responsibility, especially of knowing that one’s freedom stops where those of others begin. We keep and enjoy ours; they keep and enjoy theirs. Plus, we owe the larger community the duty of contributing our quota to securing and ensuring order, peace and progress. Why is incest a taboo? Why is a father not ‘free’ to lie with his daughter even if she consents; a mother with her son; siblings, etc.? Why is incest a crime and punishable by the law of the land? Of course, incest, as typical of sexual encounters, all things being equal, promises pleasure to parties involved and has no business to do with consanguinity (blood relationship). However, it holds pain to the society at large because of the negatives associated with inbreeding, which can especially result in handicapped children.

And so, freedom and choice can be guided and guarded by information, morality and community. There are not unlimited after all. I hope this is not disappointing.

While I was working on my new book, The Wonder of Books, I requested Michelle to write in what she felt, liked or loved about books. She obliged my request. Michelle is this darling jolly good fellow, who tells her truth without mincing words. To say the least, she’s amazing – in every sense of that word. Check out her journey with books here:

“Reading, as a hobby started with fiction and stayed that way for a long time. From early books like “Chike and the River” and “Eze goes to school,” my imagination was opened. And so, at an early age, I found myself wondering what was going on in people’s minds and how they saw things, and wishing they would write it down so I could experience it with them. My imagination was made fertile and my horizon broadened.

After that, I encountered fiction set in the Victorian era. Oh what joy! I finally understood their ways, feelings, politics and society. It was like being transported to the past – a world of breeches and gowns, corsets and garlands, polite talks and veiled speeches. My perception of the world changed and my vocabulary was greatly coloured at the time by words like Nay, Aye, Milord and Milady, Dukes, Duchesses, Earls and all the pomp that went along with it. I would curtsey in my mind when talking to an elder. I dreamed of a world of being so proper and beautiful. Again, I had a taste of a world that my age mates knew nothing of and could care less about. It’s a euphoric feeling.

Then, I got a little serious and started reading about subjects. Psychology was my first port of call. It was enlightening. Getting to know how people thought and why they did what they did. At the time, the tendency of developing multiple personality was so great because I had such detailed imaginations about what I had read. I could talk and parley with the elderly because of the wealth of knowledge I had acquired. My hunger to learn more did not stop there, because like a fire being fed, it continued to rage. I moved on to self-help and motivational books. I had to improve – the books made me realize I had to push my limits. Anytime I thought I had attained perfection, another book showed me why I had to up my ante. I realized that some talk could be all excitement and emptiness. I wanted depth so that the “imaginations” could have and make meaning to others.

Thus far have I come, still acquiring knowledge and being further in my thinking and understanding than most of my peers. I can say that the flavour of my personality has been greatly coloured by the knowledge I have gained from reading, because I have combined a lot of people’s experiences and imagination with mine and that has put me ahead and given me a class of my own. I look forward to reading more because it’s the most exciting thing in the world.”

Chioma Michelle Odigbo

odigbochiomalovette@gmail.com