My family and I have returned from vacation, full of pictures and great memories. Besides the good quality time we had together, one memory stands out more than others. It’s a story, really, told to me by a man who spends his days picking up garbage as he walks on the beach.
I met this curious man on the last day of our trip. We were taking farewell pictures when I noticed him walking along the beach and bending down from time to time to pick up what I imagined were shells. I continued to watch him, and as curiosity got the best of me, I decided to approach him and find out what he was dong.
“Good morning,” I said. “How are you doing today?”
“I’m doing great, thank you.” He kept moving as he talked.
“What are you collecting there?” I asked him.
I’m collecting treasures,” he replied. Then he opened his hands to show me what lay inside. I saw fishing thread, a couple of marbles, shards of glass, and some bits of metal. His hands were full of tiny pieces of garbage.
Why had he called his collection of garbage “treasures?”
He saw my confusion and explained that while these tiny pieces of garbage might seem insignificant to most people, they could be the cause of death for countless marine animals.
He soon told me how he’d come to spend his days picking up garbage on the beach. He used to live and work on the Mainland, where he was a business owner. Then one day he took a vacation to an island. He was walking along and come across a dead whale on the beach. When they cut open its stomach, they found it was full of tiny pieces of garbage, just like the ones he was collecting when I met him.
After that, his life was changed. He sold his business and moved to the island. He now lives there full-time, on a modest income, and spends his days ridding the beaches of tiny pieces of garbage that most people would overlook.
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Even though this man obviously believed his daily efforts were worth while, I wondered. There was so much garbage; how could the small amount he managed to collect each day make any difference?
But then I was reminded of another, similar story I’d once heard:
A young man is walking along the ocean and sees a beach on which thousands and thousands of starfish have washed ashore. Further along he sees an old man, walking slowly and stooping often, picking up one starfish after another and tossing each one gently into the ocean. “Why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?” he asks.
“Because the sun is up and the tide is going out, and if I don’t throw them further in, they will die.”
“But, old man, don’t you realize there are miles and miles of beach and starfish all along it! You can’t possibly save them all; you can’t even save one-tenth of them. In fact, even if you work all day, your efforts won’t make any difference at all.”
The old man listens calmly and then bends down to pick up another starfish and throw it into the sea. “It made a difference to that one.”
The big lesson here is that we don’t necessarily have to change the minds or habits of every single person to make a difference. We don’t have to build a multimillion-dollar company to be called a success. We can make a small impact. We can find happiness in making small contributions, because small is important too.
If what you do saves one starfish, then you’ve made the difference to that one, and that’s reason enough to continue in your work.
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