Starfish
As
a man walked a desolate beach one cold, gray morning he began to see
another figure, far in the distance. Slowly the two approached each other,
and he could make out a local native who kept leaning down, picking
something up and throwing it out into the water. Time and again he hurled
things into the ocean.
As
the distance between them continued to narrow, the man could see that the
native was picking up starfish that had been washed upon the beach and,
one at a time, was throwing them back into the water.
Puzzled, the man
approached the native and asked what he was doing. "I'm throwing
these starfish back into the ocean. You see, it's low tide right now and
all of these starfish have been washed up onto the shore. If I don't throw
them back into the sea, they'll die up here from lack of oxygen."
"But
there must be thousands of starfish on this beach," the man replied.
"You can't possibly get to all of them. There are just too many. And
this same thing is probably happening on hundreds of beaches all up and
down this coast. Can't you see that you can't possibly make a
difference?"
The local native
smiled, bent down and picked up another starfish, and as he threw it back
into the sea he replied, "Made a difference to that one!"
Each
of us is but one person: limited, burdened with our own cares and
responsibilities. We may feel there is so much to be done, and we have so
little to give. We're usually short of everything, especially time and
money. When we leave this shore, there will still be millions of starfish
stranded on the beach. Maybe we can't change the whole world, but there
isn't one of us who can't help change one person's whole world. One at a
time. We DO make a difference.
~ based
on the story by Loren Eisley
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