She was puzzled when she saw a young boy doing this at the beach. His response was pure gold.

“The tide has washed the starfish onto the beach and they cannot return to the sea by themselves,” the youth replied. “When the sun rises, they will die, unless I throw them back to the sea.”

As the youth explained, I surveyed the vast expanse of beach, stretching in both directions beyond my sight. Starfish littered the shore in numbers beyond calculation.

The hopelessness of the youth’s plan became clear to me and I countered, “But there are more starfish on this beach than you can ever save before the sun is up. Surely you cannot expect to make a difference.”

The youth paused briefly to consider my words, bent to pick up a starfish and threw it as far as possible. Turning to me he simply said, “I made a difference to that one.”

I left the boy and went home, deep in thought of what the boy had said. I returned to the beach and spent the rest of the day helping the boy throw starfish in to the sea.

When you examine the enormity of suffering around us, the world can seem bleak. It’s not possible for one person to fix it all.

But that doesn’t mean one person cannot make a difference.

If you think about your existence, your life is your everything and your entirety. By saving one creature’s life, you essentially have enabled their entire world to thrive instead of die.

And if each person on the planet did their part to help another, our planet would flourish.

To save one life is an act of heroism.

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