Once upon a time, there was an old man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach every morning to get his thoughts together for his writing.
Early one morning, he was walking along the shore after a big storm had passed and found the vast beach littered with starfish as far as the eye could see, stretching in both directions.
Off in the distance, the old man noticed a small boy doing some kind of strange motion.
The boy would run towards the ocean, throw something into the sea, run back to the beach, bend down as if to pick up on an object, run towards the water and throw that object into the vast sea.
It looked like some sort of ritual, a cosmic dance from a distance as the old man became more and more curious as he walked swiftly towards the boy.
The boy came closer still and the man called out, “Good morning! May I ask what it is that you are doing?”
The young boy paused, looked up, and replied “Throwing starfish into the ocean. The tide has washed them up onto the beach and they can’t return to the sea by themselves,” the youth replied. “When the sun gets high, they will die, unless I throw them back into the water.”
The old man replied, “But there must be tens of thousands of starfish on this beach. I’m afraid you won’t really be able to make much of a difference.”
The boy bent down, picked up yet another starfish and threw it as far as he could into the ocean.
Then he turned, smiled and said, “It made a difference to that one!”
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Original version attributed to Loren Eiseley
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