Summer is for Singing
The Ants and the Grasshopper- Aesop
One fine day in winter some ants were busy drying their store of corn, which had got rather damp during a long spell of rain. Presently up came a grasshopper and begged them to spare her a few grains. "For," she said, "I'm simply starving." The ants stopped work for a moment, though this was against their principles. "May we ask," said they, "what you were doing with yourself all last summer? Why didn't you collect a store of food for the winter?" "The fact is," replied the grasshopper, "I was so busy singing that I hadn't the time." "If you spent the summer singing," replied the ants, "you can't do better than spend the winter dancing." And they chuckled and went on with their work.
I will admit that the first time I read this, all I thought of was how jealous I was of the grasshopper, because she got to sing and dance all year long. And then I realized that that wasn't supposed to be the moral of the story, and Aesop's fables ALWAYS have a moral. Oops. But in reading this two, three, and four times over, I'm having a hard time finding one. I know it's supposed to be to work- to gather food before you have fun. But that's not what I see. If nothing else, this just makes me grateful that there are so many different types of people in the world. There are people willing to be the starving artists, and people willing to be the responsible ones. And see? The ants didn't criticize the grasshopper. They didn't yell at him for being dumb. And the grasshopper didn't complain or deny the facts said about him. What a wonderful combination! Too bad we're all humans and we find pleasure in criticism. I think more people need to sing. That would fix things.
