The Starfish Story

Image by Pedro Lastra (Unsplash)

The sun had just appeared above the horizon minutes ago. A young man emerged from his bungalow and began walking along the beach just above the water.

After traveling some distance, he noticed an old man far off in the distance ahead of him. He was standing along the water’s edge and occasionally he would stoop to the sand then appear to throw something into the water. He did this odd action dozens of times before the young man finally reached a place where he could actually understand what was happening.

The old man, bent and grizzly, was stooping to reach the starfish strewn along the sand where the tide had deposited them the night before. As the young man watched him perform this act over and over again, he realized there were hundreds - maybe thousands - of starfish along this stretch of beach. The young man also noticed that the sun had risen high enough that the air temperature was climbing rapidly. Soon it would be too hot for the starfish to survive on the hot sands.

The old man continued his never-ending task tossing starfish back into the ocean one at a time when the younger man broke the sound of the crashing waves by asking several questions without giving the older gentleman time to reply.

“What are you doing? Why are you throwing the starfish back into the water? There must be a thousand starfish along the beach! An old man like you, all by himself, cannot possibly clear the shoreline of all these starfish. How can it possibly matter?

The old man paused for a moment, but only a moment, and looking down at the starfish in his hand replied,

“It matters to this one, it matters to this one.”

This original story by Loren Eiseley.