Grasshopper in an ant suit

I’ve always been haunted by the fable of the grasshopper and the ants. It’s summertime and the grasshopper is out there partying and having a great old time. The ants meanwhile are working hard, gathering food for the difficult times they know lie ahead when winter comes. The grasshopper tries to entice them to party with him but the ants turn him down saying that they need to keep working hard in preparation for the changing season. Eventually when winter comes, the ants are tucked up cosy in their nest with all the food they gathered during the summer, having a grand old time of their own. The grasshopper meanwhile has nothing to eat and the weather has turned bitterly cold. He approaches the ants for help and they tell him “Sorry bud. You shouldn’t have spent all that time lazing around. If you had have worked hard like us you’d have plenty to eat now”. And they ignore the urgent pleading of the freezing grasshopper and leave him to starve to death.

I guess I first had that story along with other of Aesop’s equally uplifting fables read to me by my mum when I was six or seven years old and it has stuck with me. The bleak outcome for the grasshopper was very off-putting. It seemed clear that being an ant was the way to go. I’m not sure if the ancient Greeks invented capitalism, but this seems straight out of that play book. Work hard when you’re young and able, don’t be frivolous and indulgent with your time and then by the time you get to retirement age, you can stop working and you’ll have plenty of savings to see you through your dotage. That theory was what fuelled the twentieth century where people would work and work continuously for fifty or so years to save a nest egg for retirement. But I’ve always struggled with that. The grasshopper seems to be having a way better time and hey, summer seems long. Winter seems forever away and may never arrive in any case. And when it does, I’ll probably be too old and decrepit to enjoy the feasts of my labour in any case.

I’ve had many long stints as a grasshopper and it suits me well. It’s my favourite me. But the coming of winter has often played on my mind and so I’ve had a specially tailored ant suit crafted for me to wear. It fits me perfectly and is quite a convincing one. It comes complete with ant-like behaviours where I work long hours and produce quality results. If you didn’t know any better and you peered over at me, you could easily mistake me for an ant, though it’s true that sometimes the costume slips and one of my long green antennae pops out when I don’t mean for it to. I try to stack away as much food as I possibly can in the shortest period of time to allow me to get back to lazing under a tree in the warming summer sun, singing my song well into the barmy evening. Over the last few years the ant suit has fitted me so perfectly that at times I’ve had difficulty taking it off. And that is when another thought tends to come to mind. I’ve always had a belief, also involving ants and which I unimaginatively call the ant theory, that just like in Aesop’s tale you are an ant. You are going about your business, working hard, gathering food and doing whatever it is that ants do. Everything appears to be going along swimmingly well when all of a sudden a giant foot lands on you and you are a dead squashed ant. Winter will never come for you, so what was all that working about? Might as well have been hanging out with the grasshoppers.

And therein lies the conundrum. What will come first? Winter or the giant foot from above?

There is another thing that comes to mind when I ponder Aesop’s fable, and that is what a pack of pricks the ants are. Bad luck. We told you so. You should have been more like us. We’ll leave you to die now in your hour of need. And I can’t help but feel that this attitude is one taken now by many people when dealing with others different to us when they truly require our assistance. You’re not like us. We’re going to look after our own first (as if it’s not possible to help your own and somebody else at the same time). We’ll just lock you up and leave you to go mad or die on a prison island. We’ll build a wall to keep you out. We’ll shout racist abuse at you online and sometimes to your face. Our leaders will make policies to ensure that you suffer because that’s what they think our colony wants. It will dissuade others from coming and seeking our help. And in the case of the majority of those people in need, they weren’t actually grasshoppers at all, but just some different species of ant whose nests were destroyed by some force beyond their control. The ant theory writ large on their lives. History has shown that it could happen to any of us. Where and the circumstances into which you were born are just pure luck, for good or for bad. But I digress…

Being diagnosed with kidney cancer felt like I had that giant foot hovering just above me. Would it come crushing down on me or would it step over me and leave me unharmed? When it moved on and I was able to breathe once more I couldn’t work out which ant parable I was in. It seemed like a convoluted mix of the two. There was stuff all money in the bank despite all my working. Was this to be winter arriving? A long illness with no income available? Should I have been working harder and saving up for this moment? Or was it a wake-up call that the foot could come down at any minute when least expected so just dance in the sun while you are able? On my first overseas work trip after I’d had a kidney and the cancer extracted from my body I found myself caught between these two trains of thought. I was in Boston, a city which I had never previously visited and so had a strong yearning to explore and perhaps find some other grasshoppers to hang around with. I heard a voice inside my head say, “come on Greg, you need to remember why you are here”. It was a work trip. I had a presentation to deliver and potential customers to meet and try and woo. I needed to stay focussed. But then I heard the voice speak the same message with a deeper context. “Remember why you are here!” and that had me asking myself what is the point of being here at all if I don’t make the most of it and enjoy what’s on offer? Should the ant suit come off? But my health scare was all too recent and I found myself passing up a number of opportunities that any self-respecting grasshopper would have jumped at. As time has moved on from there, I have progressed into my next phase of being. The foot isn’t hanging over me now really any more than it hangs over all of us. An old friend who has been living in India for the last twenty-five years or so just dropped dead the other day seemingly without any significant warning. Another sad and sobering reminder in what seems to now be far too frequent an occurrence. I’ve decided to try and maximise the ant suit, to turbo-charge my food gathering bull ant style, and to seek it far and wide. I’m in my professional prime. I’m good at what I do and I enjoy my work. But at the same time I intend to ensure that the grasshopper side of me has a little more time to play and to just chill out. To that end, when I jet off overseas for work, I’m going to take members of my family with me as often as I can and tack some extra time on the trips to just hang out with them in some different locations. I'm going to put family holidays in interesting places as a top priority and given that my work is taking me all over the world at the moment, to recognise the unique opportunity I have to do this and to make the most of it. There’ll definitely be a lot less food saved for winter but that foot could come down at any moment for any of us, so…what the hell.