I might be the only person on Earth who hadn't heard the starfish story before, but it came to me at such a perfect time that I don't mind being left out of the loop for 27 years.
I recently traveled to Haiti, where I volunteered as a nurse in a hospital in Port-au-Prince. It was an awesome experience and I got to meet some really brave and wonderful people, both Haitians and traveling volunteers like myself. I was in charge of a whole ward of patients, mostly post-operative with arm, leg, and spinal injuries sustained during the earthquake and subsequent aftershocks. I stayed busy passing pain medications and antibiotics when they were available, changing bandages, helping people learn how to walk and function in their daily lives again with missing limbs or painful incisions, stuff like that.
About a week after I got home I was back at work at my real job, and of course, my co-workers wanted to know about my trip. I would always tell them how awesome it was, stunned them with the primitiveness of the conditions I worked in (no fancy equipment or easily accessible supplies that we take for granted here), and pretty much gave them all the good stories. Like my MacGyver moments (that time I couldn't find an IV pole for a patient, so I fashioned one out of a tree branch I found outside was a popular one), or how I slept on a cot under a tarp on the roof of the hospital because it was so overcrowded with patients. I'm not really a super-emo person who likes to talk about their feelings all the time, I usually save those for my cat, but I do have one friend at work with whom I'm particularly close to that I ended up admitting the one bittersweet thing about the mission that was ruining all the awesome.
When she asked me about Haiti, maybe she picked up on my slight hesitation before I smiled and started giving my generic sugar-coated story, because when I was done, she wanted to know what was wrong. I decided to tell her my little secret. I explained to her that while I felt good about helping the few that I could, in hindsight I felt like a drop in a bucket. That whole country needs help - they needed help before the earthquake hit, they need even more now - and I was foolish to think that my work really mattered in the grand scheme of things.
She asked me if I ever heard the starfish story, and I said no. She laughed, and told me this:
"Once upon a time, there was a beach full of starfish who had been stranded in the sand by a big wave, and were drying up in the sun. A small boy was spending his morning throwing them back in, one by one. An old man happened upon this boy, and asked him what he was doing. The boy said 'I'm throwing these starfish back into the water, because if I don't, they will die out here in the sun.' The man said 'But boy, there are miles of beach covered in starfish. It doesn't matter how hard you try, you surely won't be able to get them all, or even most of them! Why bother?' The boy listened politely, and when the man had finished talking, he leaned over to pick up another starfish, threw it in the water, and replied 'It mattered to that one.'"
Or rather, it might seem small, but to one person it's the whole world.
I love the starfish story. It really sums up being nice in small ways.