Make a difference

A man was walking down a deserted beach at sunset. As he walked along, he could see another man in the distance coming towards him. As he drew nearer, he noticed that the other man he kept leaning down, picking something up and throwing it out into the sea. Time and again he kept hurling things out into the water.

As they came closer, he noticed that the man was picking up starfish that had washed up on the beach, and, one at a time was throwing them back into the sea.

Puzzled by this, he approached the man and said. “Good evening, I was wondering what you are doing.”

“I’m throwing these starfish back into the Sea. You see, it’s 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 water, they’ll die from lack of oxygen.”

“I understand,” he replied, “but there must be thousands of starfish on this beach. You can’t possibly get to all of them. There are simply too many. Don’t you realize this is probably happening on hundreds of beaches all up and down this coast. Can’t you see that you can’t possibly make a difference?”

The man smiled, bent down and picked up  another starfish, and as he threw it back into the water, he replied,

 “Made a difference to that one!”