A young man was walking down a deserted Mexican beech at sunset….

As he walked along, he began to see another man in the distance. As he grew nearer, he noticed that the man kept leaning down and picking something up and throwing it out into the sea. Time and time again, he kept hurling things out into the ocean.

As the man approached even closer, he noticed that the man was picking up starfish that had been washed up on the beach and, one at time, was throwing them back into the water…..

The young man was puzzled… He approached the man and said ‘Good evening friend, I was wondering what you are doing’?

‘I’m throwing these starfish back into the ocean. You see, its 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’ the man replied….

‘I understand’ the young man replied, ‘but there must be thousands of starfish on this beech. You can’t possibly get to them all of them. There are simply too many…don’t you realise this is happening on hundreds of beeches all up and down this coast?

Can’t you see that you can’t possible make a difference?

The man smiled, bent down, and picked up yet another starfish and threw it back into the sea, and replied

‘I made a difference to that one’……..

That’s all for today, until the next time,

Tristan ‘starfish thrower’ Buttle.

P.S- today’s content is taken from Chicken Soup for the soul, a collection of thought provoking short stories that is well worth checking out, have a read here.