It's a Bag of Mice

This morning, KPTV news featured a story about a pizzeria owner who tired to sabotage rival pizzerias by entering at least two competitor's establishments with a garbage bag full of mice.  He brought a garbage bag in, went to the restroom and then emerged minus bag.  Vigilant pizzeria owners soon discovered the mice still in the bag.

http://www.kptv.com/news/27030713/detail.html

On camera, one of the pizzeria owners recounted the incident and discovery.  His exclamation, "It's a bag of mice!" replayed several times during the segment.  The kids and I found this amusing.  We kept repeating, "It's a bag of mice!" during breakfast.  Of course, my son had to get creative and a bag of mice soon became a "bag of microwaves" and then a "bag of kitchen appliances" which is rather funny when you imagine how it would have looked and how hard it would have been to drag around a bag of kitchen appliances.  For some reason, the desperate perpetrator didn't know that people entering pizzerias with garbage bags full of anything would cause owners to take notice.

"It's a bag of mice" continued to amuse me on my drive to work.  I wanted to find a topic to write about but "a bag of mice" was all that rattled in my head.  Wait! Didn't I just write about mice? Mental mice?  Looks like I might have an infestation.  The karmic cat of serendipity is bringing mice to my door, again!  I groan under the weight of the thought.  Nothing else comes to mind.  It takes energy to be annoyed.  It's just not worth it at 7:30 a.m.  So I choose the path of least resistance which I call "the path of least resistance."

Often, resistance is futile.  No where is this more obvious than in the behavior of teenagers.  I was driving to work so I could enter a living laboratory of teenage "mice".  Being argumentative and oppositional comes so easily to the adolescent of the species.  They resist just about everything, especially authority figures.  It's easy to get sucked in to this trap of resistance.  Initially, I would be pulled in and feel my own resistance rise.  Trying to be an authority figure was too hard. 

Instead, I learned to relax, to carefully chose the things and incidents that can not be ignored.  Then, instead of approaching as an authority, I learned to respect their right to make choices very different from what I might chose.  Their resistance is rarely about the object or the person they are resisting.  Empathy opens doors that my resistance can't.  I've discovered that I'm much more effective as an authority figure when I stopped trying to be one.  I can enjoy many parts of my day now that I've accepted my place as a mouse alongside a bunch of younger mice who sometimes need older mice like me to just listen to them and give them some positive attention. 

Maybe if the desperate and misguided pizzeria owner had understood that we're all a bunch of mice just trying to get along, he wouldn't have tried to sabotage some of his fellows just doing the best they can in this crazy laboratory called life.