Who created Jiminy Cricket?

Today a friend told me that ATM’s should have a psychotherapy service after 2:00 AM, since anyone who would go take out cash at that hour is probably looking for trouble in his or her life. The comment made me think about a little “Jiminy Cricket After-Party” that according to everything our parents, our priests and our ethics professors taught us, we should all carry in our consciousness in order to avoid bringing these problems into our lives.

But afterwards I thought about what today’s heresy is: Jiminy Cricket should be asleep. We all bring to our lives everything that we need to bring for our learning, including the problems, and what’s more, especially our problems! There are no good or bad situations—everything that we bring to our lives is perfect because it makes us grow.

So Jiminy is an invention of an external code of values, call it morality, religion, or whatever name evokes the sacred, but the truth is that life puts us on the road that we need to be on. Rejecting free choice and sticking to this external code is perhaps creating an obstacle for a learning opportunity which we should have; we look for problems because it is in our exercise of getting out of them and creating solutions that we get trained as comprehensive human beings, as leaders of our own existence.

This is why I admire so much those who have fallen, who have been mistaken, who have erred, who have left Jiminy Cricket in the children’s story where he belongs and have dared to live in order to accept afterwards all this packet of errors and problems and, with their whole heart, look for the way out, reinvent themselves, grow, emerge, come out. Those who have strayed are the best teachers in my life, because they show me the courage of getting back up again-- these are the best Jiminy Crickets of any story.