“Starfish Thrower”

A young 20 something was jogging down the beach, not a care in the world. In the distance she saw someone doing what seemed like calisthenics.

As she got closer, she noticed that the figure was that of an old man, and that what he was doing was not calisthenics after all. The old man was reaching down picking up small objects, and throwing them into the ocean.

The young woman asked: “Hi there, what are you doing?”

The old man paused, looked up, and replied “Throwing starfish into the sea.”

“But why?”

To this, the old man replied, “The tide is going out. If I don’t throw them in, they’ll die.”

At this the young woman commented, “But, do you not realize that there are miles and miles of beach and there are starfish all along every mile? You can’t possibly make a difference!”

At this, the old man bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it into the sea.

As it floated away, he said, “It made a difference for that one.”

Her jogging slowed down. She stopped.  She spent the rest of the day throwing starfish into the sea alongside the old man.

(Loren Eiseley was archeologist, anthropologist and naturalist as well as writer and poet. Eiseley wrote in the tradition of the 19th-century essayists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, observing and recording nature and stressing the contemplative rather than the factual.)