Newsletter – September 2025 – The Starfish Story
An old man walked across the beach until he came across a young boy throwing something into the breaking waves. Upon closer inspection, the old man could see that the boy was tossing stranded starfish from the sandy beach, back into the ocean.
“What are you doing, young man?” He asked.
“If the starfish are still on the beach when the sun rises, they will die,” the boy answered.
“That is ridiculous. There are thousands of miles of beach and millions of starfish. It doesn’t matter how many you throw in; you can’t make a difference.”
“It matters to this one,” the boy said as he threw another starfish into the waves. “And it matters to this one.”
Every action that you do has an effect. Every.single.one. It ultimately is the law of cause and effect. The problem is we spend so much of our lives looking to make the biggest difference or the biggest splash. We want to throw the biggest stone in the water, so we can see the fruit of our endeavours quickly.
This becomes problematic if this is all you focus on. Some of your actions that you perceive as small, has the potential to have the biggest ripple effect in not only this physical life but those beyond as well. Let us think of a possible example. You are waiting in an elevator to the car park in a shopping mall and just as the door is closing, you see a woman running frantically. You can see she is in a desperate state to get in with you. In this moment you put your hand in front of the doors and make sure the doors do not close, allowing her to get on. She thanks you graciously, and you get on with your day.
For that women those precious moments allowed her to get to her car quicker and be in the room just as her mother was beginning to pass. She could hold her hand and say goodbye. This helped her in her grieving process in the days/months/years to come. As she grieved, it opened new pathways in her inner world about how she saw things. She became wiser and was able to pass this wisdom to both friends and family. Her mother on the other side was given the opportunity to walk with her daughter in the physical and she could move some of her emotional patterns within spirit. And on and on it goes.
Sounds farfetched? Take a moment today to think about those moments in your life that changed you. Think about all of the smaller choices that had to take place to get to the moment where your life was profoundly impacted. You matter. Your choices matter. There might be a day where you see the impact they caused.
