But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,

In proving foresight may be vain:

The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men

          Gang aft agley,

An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

          For promis’d joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!

The present only toucheth thee:

But Och! I backward cast my e’e,

          On prospects drear!

An’ forward tho’ I canna see,

          I guess an’ fear!

Those are the last two stanzas of one of Robert’s Burns most famous poems… also the lines that led to John Steinbeck’s novella title Of Mice and Men.

For those who are not among the English teacher poetry crowd, the poem was about turning up a mouse’s house with a plow when the winter months were coming on and Burns’ reflection on it.  (Some write poetry… others blog, I suppose).  Anyway, he is telling the mouse that all of his foresight of trying to get his house set up before winter came to nothing… because the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry…

Even though that line in the penultimate stanza may be the MOST famous… the one that resonates with me most is the final stanza…

To paraphrase, Burns says: Mouse, you’re lucky compared with me.  You’re only worried about living in the now.  Me?  I have to look back on my past mistakes and feel bad…  and even though I can’t predict the future, I worry about it.

If you sit and think about life too much, you’ll be overwhelmed by its ridiculousness (riciculosity?).  Sometimes I’d rather be the mouse.  Most of the time I’d rather be the mouse.

Every month… numbers come into my account…  That’s what I get in return for work… Numbers.  Then I take those numbers and dole them out to other people for things they have given me during the month or will give me…  Here’s some numbers for electricity.  Here’s some numbers for cable… Let me save some numbers in case I need to use them later. Mostly I like to give the numbers to people who give me entertainment in return.

I get my numbers for going to a big building every day.  People send their children to the big building.  Every. single. bit. of the information that children receive in this big building is available on the machine I’m typing on right now.  On Monday, I’m going to teach one group of students about satire and another about Macbeth.  If I were to go onto the Internet right now, I could find videos of people teaching these things in hundreds of different ways.  I could find all of the information that I’m going to give them…   Yet people give me numbers so that I will give them information that already exists everywhere.

I feel strongly about going to a place in a couple of weeks and checking off names on a ballot.  These people are going to make up rules for me to follow and they are going to decide how many of my numbers I can keep. They are rule makers so that we can be rule followers.  They get numbers for making rules for people.  Some big big companies with LOTS of numbers give them lots of numbers so that they like their rules better.

Some of the people who get the most numbers are the ones who entertain us.  These are people who put on matching clothes and run around really fast.  Stadiums full of people give away the numbers that their work gave them so that they can go watch people who are better at running around than they are… and they get very upset and angry and fight with each other when someone wearing different colors doesn’t follow the rules or outruns the guy with the other colors.

They get just as upset when these people choose a different rule maker who decides where their numbers are going to go.  They take it very personally.

Some people read books that they say have ALL the rules that matter.  The ONLY rules that matter.  They read different books but everyone says their book is the only book.  They try to choose rule makers who read the same book that they do because the rule maker THEY choose needs to make their rules  for EVERYBODY based on the book that THEY read.  Everyone thinks their book is the best book… except for the people who DON’T like the books.  They say the books are dumb and you can’t ask rule makers to follow your book when everyone can read different books.

People fight and worry about all of these things…like they matter… like any of it actually matters…which is so arrogant in terms of the universe…  which has been around for billions of years… or thousands of years… based on what your book tells you.

But you really can’t think about it too much… because if you do, you’ll go stark raving mad.

Best to be the mouse.