There are so many stories in the news relating human suffering - either nature made, man made, self-inflicted or a combination of all three causal agents - that it is difficult to keep gloom and doom away from recurring trips to my brain. The Italian cruise ship disaster, missing children, missing mothers, deceased soldiers, a young woman who walked into the moving propeller of an airplane.....the list could go on and on, which makes me wonder why I watch the news, read the newspaper or look at the updates on my phone. Good people who get diseases that no one should ever have to endure. Long-term marriages that self-destruct.........
All this brings to mind the phrase, "the best laid plans of mice and men." After I could not shake the phrase, I became curious as to its origin and found myself, once again, reading Wikipedia, the fount of all that is true and accurate. Right? I then checked two more websites and, finding corroboration, I went back to Wikipedia and re-read the information. John Steinbeck probably has the more well-known claim to fame on the phrase (using it in his famous 1937 novel, Of Mice and Men), "the best laid schemes o' mice an' men". I read the novel in high school and did remember that the phrase was contained in the text of the novel. What I did not realize that the phrase is originally attributed to the Scottish bard, Robert Burns, in his 1785 poem titled, "To A Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough".
Somewhere, either over the centuries or decades, depending on which source you most remember the phrase coming from, it has morphed from "schemes" to "plans", perhaps due to the more negative connotation of scheming versus planning? Whatever the cause of the shift, the phrase still rings true and probably will until the printed word disappears from this world. When Robert Burns immortalized the little mouse with her upended nest, little did he realize that the human race could and would identify with the mouse, on a daily basis, until the end of time. How odd that humans have so much in common with the mouse who lost her house. She planned, gathered, and executed her plan to have a safe haven only to find her life totally changed in the blink of an eye......or plough tine to be exact.
Do you ever feel like the little mouse? When our plans are the victims of upheaval - planned or unplanned, self-inflicted or otherwise - we can frantically scurry about in a frenzied fit and we can squeak as loudly as possible but, in the end, we probably have just one recourse........pick up the shovel and begin digging a new foundation, buying new two-by-fours, and rebuilding.
I'm sure Burns' little mouse did just that.
Ancora imparo
