After every storm…as the story goes…the young girl walked the beach with her grandmother collecting the starfish that had been lifted from the rocks and tossed up the beach. She learned through her grandmother how to tell the living starfish from the already perished…and with a steady hand threw the still living back into the ocean. For years this ritual continued after each storm with her grandmother…until that eventual day when her grandmother passed, and as fate would have it the heavens wailed and stormed as if in tribute to the gentle and wise woman. As the family gathered and mourned, the grand-daughter slipped away to the beach and set about tending to the starfish washed high on the beach. Soon, she was approached by other grieving family members who asked her why she was not with the rest of the family; why she was not going about the business of grieving as the others were…and why she was out on the beach tossing starfish in the water – surely a meaningless task; and that other more important matters were needing tending to out of respect to her grandmother. The grand-daughter stopped and faced her family and responded just as her grandmother had told her, when as a young girl she had challenged the virtue and purpose of saving these insignificant creatures. “Well, surely it matters to the starfish”, she said and continued on along the beach tossing the living starfish back in to the ocean…just as her grandmother had taught her.
If we are not careful…the lessons of life can be lost to us in the gravity of the moment…and what matters is less obvious than what we might immediately understand, and sometimes what really matters has very little to do with us.
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Lawrence Lewis
“Thank you Mary for sharing this story with me today…this is of course my interpretation, and if anyone knows the original story origin – please let me know the details. Thank you.”
About Lawrence Lewis
I do a number of things professionally...but most of all and the true purpose of what I do through "my work" is to provide for my family, be a good husband and great father, and try to make a difference as a world citizen...I guess it's not much more complicated than that 🙂