How Midas Are We?- Fanfiction5

So how like Midas are we? What do we sacrifice to maintain what we have, or to get what we want? This can be explored on so many levels: from our work to our home lives to our politics. Whenever we focus on one great, overarching thing in this world — a thing we believe will make our lives better — we risk becoming like Midas. We risk ruining whatever we touch. We risk our families, our country, our children, our climate and — in the end — our souls. How foolish.

Midas learned from his mistake. In the older versions of the story, his regret came too late and Midas starved to death. In Hawthorne’s, Midas receives the grace to repent and be saved. As Hawthorne’s stranger tells him: “You are wiser than you were, King Midas! … You appear to be still capable of understanding that the commonest things, such as those that lie within everybody’s grasp, are more valuable than the riches which so many mortals sigh and struggle after.”

We will enter a new year in a few weeks, a year likely to be filled with political tensions, unstable economics, migrations, war and violence in our schools and on our streets, the likelihood of more unusual weather. As we face this new year, do we understand that the most common things, things we may not even consider valuable — like a flower, a sea turtle or a stranger from another land — may be the very things that can keep our hearts soft and responsive, and thus able to save us from the danger of becoming as hard and cold like gold?