The Starfish

In a world that desperately needs positivity, kindness and love, how do we do “our part?” What does it look like and how do we get started? These questions kind of haunt me. I work with truly brilliant people, not just intelligence-wise, which is true, but also brilliant in the way they change the community and make their mark in the world. No matter how much I long to make the world a better place, no matter the impact I want to make, that will never be my path. I’m a good helper and I love that in some small way I support their impact.

Never has the question, “What can I do?” left me, though. As I approached forty it was deafening: “What’s my place in the world besides wife, mother, daughter etc.? “What is my path or my purpose, now that it’s no longer that of a full-time mom?  What, what, what, what…?”  There are a million Whats.  Whenever I’m really stuck I try to focus on the Starfish poem:

One day an old man was walking down the beach just before dawn. In the distance he saw a young girl picking up stranded starfish and throwing them back into the sea. As the old man approached the girl, he asked, “Why do you spend so much energy doing what seems to be a waste of time?” The young girl explained that the stranded starfish would die if left in the morning sun. The old man exclaimed, “But there must be thousands of starfish. Does it really matter?” The girl looked down at the starfish in her hand and as she threw it to safety in the sea, she said, “It matters to this one.”

I remember as a young child of a single mother, we didn’t have much. My mom always seemed to make Christmas special with the little money we did have. She did have a little help from Santa at the food bank. I didn’t understand as a child but I do now, that someone pulled our names off of a tree, completely random. Every year received just what we wanted, exactly what was on our list. Carefully picked out and wrapped with so much generosity and love that you could feel it. My mom never took credit for those gifts, we always knew it wasn’t her, which led me to this enormous appreciation for “the helpers.” As an adult there has never been a Christmas that we haven’t contributed at least one gift to a stranger,  no matter how tough that Christmas was; because it matters.  

As a grown woman, I can safely say that I have been that old man, arrogant and pessimistic. I have been the little girl (it’s a boy in the original poem but as any good feminist would do I changed it so that there’s equal representation) full of hope and purpose. Most importantly though, I’ve been the starfish, in desperate need of help. Over and over the people I love and people who will never know their impact have saved me. Sometimes in grand ways, like my church family did Christmas 2014 and some in seemingly small ways like buying my coffee not knowing that I’m having a particularly hard day… I have been all three.

I still don’t necessarily understand or yet know what my second act looks like, but I continue to try my best to be the helper that Mr. Rogers spoke of. I’ll buy someone’s coffee or groceries, I’ll tip a little better and send a card for no reason when I can. Way more than that though, I hope to continue to grow as a listener and communicator because I want to be the kind of human who seesother people, their struggles and sits with them, their victories and celebrates with them. I want to offer the people I cross paths with a little grace, the grace that maybe is too hard to give ourselves. Because quite frankly, life is made up of little moments that matter, even if it only matters to “this one.”