Out of the Maze summary

Eventually, Hem becomes so hungry that he feels compelled to leave Cheese Station C and search for new cheese. As he explores the maze, he comes across dark corners, and pokes his head around them to scan for cheese. He doesn’t want to venture into the darkness, because he’s afraid of getting lost. He never sees any cheese, so he keeps moving on.

He also passes what appear to be dead ends in the maze. These too seem fruitless, so he quickly moves on from them as well.

As they explore the maze together, Hem and Hope find occasional morsels of cheese and apple, but only enough for them to barely survive. As they trudge on, Hem feels increasingly nostalgic about the old days, when he and his friend Haw were living in the abundance of Cheese Station C. He wishes things could just go back to the way they were.

In the aftermath of change, we too can fall prey to an unproductive form of nostalgia. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with fondly remembering the past, but fixating on how good things used to be can lead us to resent the present, as happens with Hem.

While thinking about Hope’s puzzling suggestion, Hem recalls the time that Haw left him behind in Cheese Station C to search out new sources of cheese. Haw tried to persuade him to come along, but he refused. Hem asks himself why this happened.

He realizes that Haw had a different way of viewing their situation than he did. Haw saw Cheese Station C as a dead end and he envisioned new possibilities in other parts of the maze. These notions existed only in his mind, so they were ideas – and he trusted them.

While Hem is scratching his head about the nature of the new belief he should adopt, Hope makes a suggestion: maybe they should try to escape from the maze?

To Hem, this seems unthinkable. He has no conception of anything being outside the maze. To him, the maze is the entire world. Everything he’s ever seen has been inside the maze, and he can’t even imagine something outside of it.

Buoyed by his newfound belief in the power of believing in possibilities, Hem resolves to find a way out of the maze.

Up until now, he’s been avoiding all of the maze’s dark corners, which he’s been shying away from out of fear. But he now realizes that his fear and the avoidant behavior that results from it stem from yet another belief: A belief that the maze is dangerous.

While rejoicing in his newfound reality, Hem had one final series of realizations that brought his journey full circle.

He remembered that at the beginning, right before he left Cheese Station C out of desperation to find new cheese, he wrote down three facts on a piece of paper, so he could remember them. However, in the course of his journey, he found out that none of these facts were, in fact, true – that is to say, they weren’t facts at all! Instead, they were just yet another example of beliefs – in this case, false beliefs that were holding him back.

Both the negative and the positive powers of belief can be demonstrated with many examples that take place on a variety of levels of human life. We’ll end with a look at some of them.

Let’s start on the historical level. Consider the Titanic. When it launched, people believed it was unsinkable. As a result of this belief, the ship was not equipped with enough life boats. When the supposedly unsinkable ship did sink, more than 1,500 people lost their lives. Many of these people could have been saved if enough lifeboats had been at hand.