This also has application to our lives. Pursuit of a hope is not wrong – unless we blindly pursue it to the exclusion of other good things. Kino made this mistake when he risked his current welfare in hopes of improving his social position.  He wasn’t willing to accept even a relatively large sum of money when he thought he could do better.  We can also often be tempted to do the same in our lives.  We can be lured into risking much of what we have for just a slight improvement.

 There are a few more metaphors in the book that are secondary and supportive.  For example, the pearl represents a future, wealth, and respect.  There are many times when people try to deprive us of those, just like people tried to steal the pearl from Kino.  Kino’s family represents anything and everything we love.  If we love something, we constantly work toward improving it, which Kino does for his family.  The pearl robbers represent many people, including anyone who tries to deprive us of a future for their own benefit.  Sometimes, even people we consider our friends can do this to us.

Now that we have discussed the metaphors of the parable, let’s consider the lessons we can learn from it.  We should notice is that Kino is willing to do anything to improve his family, which is a noble quality to possess. We should also notice that this noble quality can be taken to the extreme, and become a bad quality. This was the case with Kino. Things were going relatively well for Kino in the beginning, and he did everything he could to get treatment for Coyotito when he was bitten by the scorpion. However, after Coyotito recovered, Kino continued to pursue wealth and status.  Even when he was offered a lot of money for the pearl, he risked a lot (life, family, and reasonable wealth) to gain more.  The pearl, an object that was originally sought after as a means to an end (to heal Coyotito), became an end in itself (a pathway to better things, not just restoration of normal things).

There are three morals we can apply to our life based on Kino’s mistakes. First, be content with what you have in life.  Second, although it is ok to try to make things better when there is nothing to lose, it is not worth risking the most sentimentally valuable things for more monetary value.  And last, it can be wrong for a good intention to become a means for personal improvement.