Midas without the Gold

Coming down from the city, for the weekend, isn't just coming home anymore. It isn't just as simple as going from one place to another. It isn't just a transition from one kind of lifestyle to another, like a record jumping from one speed to another. It is a migration, of a herd of humanity; every bit as blind and relentlessly driven as a herd of cattle.

Sitting in a bus, fighting traffic snarls for over 4 hours, I looked at the continuous stream of vehicles, pouring out of the city, heading into the night - in a bid to escape it seemed to me. Escape to where the air is cleaner, the Sun is brighter, sounds sweeter and laughter richer. Escape from what once used to be as beautiful and as rich a place as the sanctuary to which everyone now fled.

That was it. Right there. The scariest thought possible.

In our never-ending search for the perfect home, the perfect city, the perfect everything, did we realise that we were creating gross travesties of perfection? Like droplets of delayed-action poison, did we realise that we were slowly, but surely, stripping the land, smogging the air, trashing the water, and inescapably leeching the Life from everything we touched?

We are running out of places to run to. We are running out of sanctuaries and paradise is as far away as the day the dream began. Surrounded by gardens of our own destructive talents, we refuse to see that we are the gardeners who created it all.

We are all of us Midas - only without the Gold.