When we’re kids our parents stop us from eating too much of the bread at restaurants so we’ll have room for dinner and make sure we rake in the nap time so they can have a break and we won’t be so grumpy later (those tiny growing bodies use up their energy reserves so quickly). With all the rules we’re given from such a young age it’s no wonder that the two principles which most preoccupy us during our developing years are:

1. When I grow up, I’ll make my own rules; and,
2. When I grow up, I’ll know and be awesome at everything.

Then, we actually grow up and something is clearly missing. There are larger, societal rules our lives have been preparing us to follow (so making our own rules has been thrown out the window) and we feel deeply unprepared and clueless despite our lifelong training while everyone around us totally seems to have this adulting thing down pat. This is the unspoken confirmation of why the elder brothers did not bring the youngest brother into the fold.

Mousetraps. For a long time, mankind has perceived the mouse as being a very meek creature, frightened of anything and everything. Yet for all that perceived meekness and fear, the mouse survives year after year without ever going extinct.

As children we dream of being confident adults who always know what to do and when to do it. When we grow up and do not feel steadfast, we look around us for confirmation of what grownups are supposed to do and see our peers doing decidedly better than us. Comparing ourselves to others is a mousetrap.

Consider then the youngest son having no place in the house of his brothers. His cat has been replaced with mousetraps meant to keep rodents away and which inadvertently keep him away. He has been made equal to the mice, an unneeded/unwanted annoyance.

He sees his brothers easily going into business with each other and himself out in the cold. He was not his father’s primary investment, he had never felt the need to work especially hard, and what use he did have in the world has been usurped by a machine. He is a mouse on the verge of being caught in a mousetrap.

He sees himself headed toward the doom inherent in that mousetrap (if I’m of no use like my brothers are then I can’t take care of myself and if I can’t take care of myself then I’ll die), and then expresses his fear out loud as a declaration of surrender. This is what fear does. It sees difficulty or uncertainty or outright doom and declares “Shut it down, shut it all down, play dead, curl up in a ball on the floor in the corner."

Surrendering to “defeat” and playing dead and running away are all the same thing. They are the flight reflex of fear, a reaction meant to help you survive an attack by getting out of dodge or making yourself look super un-intimidating to your perceived threat. When we compare ourselves to others and don’t like what we see of ourselves, it’s easy to want to throw in the towel and say “What’s the point of trying?"

Well, trying is a kind of fighting. Ever heard of fight-or-flight? That’s dual-nature fear being all "we can avoid this all together or we can do something about it."

Mice are more likely to pick flight having the reflexes and speed necessary. Have you ever seen a mouse go up against a mousetrap? Only an older mouse that doesn’t literally have a spring in his step gets caught by those things (or one of the Three Stooges).

To catch a mouse you need something quicker. You need something that keeps going, keeps trying after that initial launch sequence. You need to replace the mousetrap you’re headed toward with a cat in all its fighting, trickster glory.