Feeling Blah

It’s the middle of May and 70 degrees still seems imaginative. It’s Sunday and I have this to do and that to do. Frankly, I’m grumpy. I have a serious attack of the I-don’t-wannas. Worse, I read the newspaper and that is usually a depressing idea – no, a depressing reality.

Fortunately, I have a wife who won’t abide me in this mood for more than a paragraph or so and she always says whatever I need to hear to wake me up (often something as subtle as, “Michael – Wake up!”) So that’s what I’m thinking about – the idea of waking up.

There’s no accounting for being in a blah-mood. I mean, there are reasons. But there are always reasons, no better than today’s and no worse than today’s. There are also reasons for not being in that discouraging mood, no better and no worse than all the others. Having a ‘reason-scale’ makes no sense. I have never heard of anyone ever changing a mood by logic.

But there is one question that never fails to wake me up. And that is, “Who am I being?” or “Who do I want to be?” I always have a choice. I can be my moods, which change more frequently than the weather, or I can be my choice.

For most of us this is hard – choice? –Choose what? I’m lucky that way. I have said what my choice will be. I choose love and contribution, wisdom and harmony. When I don’t see one of those things going on at the moment I’ll at least see what I can do that manifests or includes some of them, like writing this.

There Is Cheese in the Tunnel

By now most of you know the metaphoric story of the relationship between the rat and the cheese. In doing a psychological study, a scientist builds a maze with five tunnels and puts some cheese at the end of one of them, say tunnel 4. He then puts a rat in the maze. The rat sniffs around. Aha! it smells cheese. It scoots down a tunnel. No cheese. Sniffs some more and scoots down a tunnel. No cheese. Finally, the rat finds the cheese. Scientist removes rat and replaces cheese in tunnel 4. The rat findsthe cheese a little faster. After a while you have a trained rat. Remove rat. Replace cheese. Zips down tunnel 4 and feasts. Then the scientist moves the cheese to another tunnel, say 2. Puts the rat in. It zooms down tunnel 4. No cheese. The rat's confused. Zips down tunnel 4. No cheese.
Here's the point of the story. The difference between rats and human beings is that eventually the rat will go down tunnel 2 and get the cheese. Human beings will go down tunnel 4 forever. It's the right tunnel. They know it. They can prove it by their history. After all, it always worked before.

One of the things I notice in relationships and in business is that we seem to have only a fixed number of available options (tunnels). So we always do one of the same old things. And we're down tunnel 4. We get one of the same old results. No cheese. Eventually we give up in frustration. But, hey! There is cheese in that tunnel. What is something new, something we haven't thought of. How do we get like the Scarecrow and 'think of things we never thunk before?'

It's a good metaphor for coaching. The wizard didn't do the job (he just gave the Scarecrow a diploma,) but it worked for the Scarecrow. There was cheese and the coach helped the client get it himself.