I first read it in 2007.
It felt slight. Obvious. Almost condescending. I understood the metaphor and set it aside.
At the time I was still inside the maze.
Still negotiating.
Still adjusting.
Still convinced that effort would restore balance.
There was still something to extract — or at least the belief that there was.
A book about leaving sounds trivial when you are still invested in staying.
Years passed.
The environment shifted in ways that were gradual enough to ignore and cumulative enough to matter. Incentives changed. Effort rose. Return diminished. The arithmetic no longer worked.
There were no explosions. Just erosion.
When I picked the book up again in 2024, it required no interpretation. It wasn’t profound. It was simply accurate.
The cheese had not moved temporarily.
It had gone.
What struck me wasn’t the call to move. It was the attachment of the characters who remained. They weren’t foolish. They were loyal — to routine, to history, to the memory of previous reward.
I recognised that posture.
Staying had once been responsible. Then it became reflex. Eventually it became cost.
There is a point at which endurance stops being strength and starts being delay. It does not arrive with drama. It arrives with arithmetic.
Energy expended. Nothing replenished.
The question changes quietly. Not “How do I make this work?” but “Why am I still here?”
When that question lands without resistance, movement follows without theatrics.
I did not understand the book in 2008 because it did not apply. In 2024 it required no belief. It described a condition that had already formed.
Some texts are instruction. This one is timing.
You either read it while there is still something left to protect, or you read it when the room is already empty.
In the second case, you do not argue with it.
You leave.