The starfish anti-parable: It didn't make a difference to that one (as far as I could tell)

Up in Maine with my parents for a few days, I was heading out to the boat with my mother. We were walking along the pier when we spotted a starfish drying out on the wooden planks. We stopped for a moment to gaze at it, marveling at how beautiful and perfectly formed it was, medium-sized, dark pink in color, wonderfully symmetrical. “Should I toss it back?” I asked my mother. “And then do I get to say ‘It mattered to that one’?”

I lifted the starfish with my thumb and forefinger, just a little bit squeamishly, and dropped it over the side. My mother and I watched it slowly sink in the shallow saltwater below the dock. “I actually don’t think it mattered to that one,” my mother said. “I think that one was already dead.”

Still, I couldn’t help but relish the irony. I’ve gone on more than one tirade about how tired I am of the Starfish Parable that has been making the rounds through motivational speeches, Sunday school classes and commencement addresses for the past five years or more – and here I was, reenacting the very same parable, sort of. Except unlike in the fable of the child who sees an expanse of beach covered with hundreds of stranded and doomed starfish and throws one back, responding to the doubter with him who says “There are hundreds; it won’t make any difference if you throw one back” with “It made a difference to that one,” I had only one starfish to save, not hundreds, and according to my mother, it appeared likely that I failed.

Ha, I muttered to myself. I’ve always known that was a silly parable. Now I know it can’t even be replicated. How long would a starfish live out of water, anyway? How does the child in the parable know that it did in fact matter to the one he threw back? For all we know, he was too late, too. It’s just that he was tossing into the pounding surf rather than the shallow and sunlit depths that I dropped my starfish into, so I could witness my own failure, whereas Parable Boy was free to assume his starfish went on to thrive.

I first heard the starfish parable at the Massachusetts Governor’s Conference for Women in Boston in December of 2006, as told by keynote speaker Attorney General Martha Coakley. Then, as tends to happen with these little tales, especially in the Internet and YouTube era, I heard it again a week later at church. And again at an awards ceremony, and the next year at a talk by a well-known children’s author (who claims his mother told him the story when he was 12, which would have been about 1964, making it a much older fable than I had thought. But I don’t necessarily believe this particular author).

My problem with it is this: many apparent disruptions in the natural world actually happen for a reason. Most of us have heard that forest fires are actually good for forests because they consume all the extra detritus on the forest floor. If hundreds of starfish ever really did beach themselves at one time, unfortunate as it may be for each of those starfish, my guess is that there was a greater purpose served in the biosystem. For example, maybe that apparent disaster corrected a population explosion among starfish that year. Maybe plankton (or whatever starfish eat) prospered that season, with some positive effect on the ecosystem underwater. Maybe seals (or whatever eat starfish) were having an overpopulation problem of their own that year, and a diminution in the starfish supply resulted in the seal population evening out.

Far be it from me to want starfish to die, but I always wonder if anyone else has the same suspicions about this particular tale. Is there possibly a reason that starfish stranded themselves on a beach? Not that it really matters, of course. Maybe it did “matter to that one,” in the case of the one the boy tossed back, but his decision to throw one back probably didn’t change whatever effect on the biosystem a mass stranding of starfish was going to have.

I’ve thought about this parable a lot. So not only was it fascinating to see a perfectly formed starfish on the pier yesterday morning; it also seemed a little bit like a sign to me. Like maybe a reminder that I’m right and that parable is silly; maybe you can’t fix some things just by making one small gesture and just maybe, you shouldn’t even have the hubris to try. Nature seldom needs correcting.

That pretty starfish appeared to sink to the bottom, dead from its stay in the sun. But it’s always possible a bottom-dwelling creature ate it anyway and prospered as a result. And maybe that’s what was meant to happen in the natural order of things all along.

Pedaling uphill

Our minister told a story from the pulpit over a year ago that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I consider it a parable; she referred to it as an “old joke,” which I would like to think suggests merely that it’s more meaningful to me than it is to her and not that I’m so simplistic that what constitutes a joke to other people is a symbolic morality tale to me, though I admit that it’s quite possible that’s true.

The story – whether joke or parable -- tells of two people riding a tandem bicycle up a steep hill. Not only is it difficult to make progress forward; the hill is so steep that they are in danger of sliding backwards. Finally they reach the top. The one in front says, “What a ride! My quads are burning up! I wasn’t sure we were going to make it!” The one in back says, “I know. I was so afraid of backsliding, I had the brakes on the whole time.”

My cyber-colleague Michele Dortch, who writes the Integrated Mother blog, posted on Twitter yesterday that her intention for the day was “to move with the flow of change & stop trying to work against its current,” and I asked her if she knew that parable. She didn’t, and I couldn’t boil it down to Twitter’s requisite 140 characters, so I promised her I would tell it in today’s blog post.

It’s a story that means a lot to me. As I often say, I’m someone who loves routine – both actual routines and the whole idea of doing something in a diurnal or otherwise regularly scheduled fashion – and, by extension, I don’t always embrace change.

Several years ago, my friend Nancy invited our family over for dinner on Labor Day, which in our town is also usually the eve of the new school year. “Oh, that’s a great idea,” I said eagerly. “And if it works out well, then next year we’ll invite your family for a Labor Day, first-day-of-school-eve dinner.”

Nancy is too clear-eyed and practical to put up with me sometimes. “I’m inviting you for a dinner, not the launch of a new tradition,” she said bluntly.

But to me, it sounded like the perfect way to launch a tradition. So the next year we did invite them, and then they invited us again, and I thought we were on to something wonderful until the year after that, when the school calendar changed and school started for the first time the week before Labor Day. I called Nancy, full of anxiety, as soon as I found out. “It’s our turn to host, but I don’t know what to do,” I confessed. “Which night do you want to come over? Is our tradition a Labor Day dinner, or a first-day-of-school-eve dinner, now that they’re not one and the same?”

So yes, I do love traditions, and that’s okay. Not being one to embrace change isn’t always bad either – until you become the person putting the brakes on the bike as someone else struggles to ride it uphill. Every now and then I stop and look at a decision I’m making or an action I’m taking and ask myself that question: “In doing this, are you the one keeping the bike from reaching the crest of the hill? Is your tendency to avoid change really more like an inability to recognize the possibility for progress?”

Sometimes, yes. I try to keep that parable in mind, because it’s a story so relevant to my life and, often, to my faults. Working against the current can be challenging but ultimately productive: just ask a salmon. Keeping a bike from being able to pedal, not so productive. Yes, it’s just a parable – or, to a more sophisticated thinker, an old joke. But to me it’s tremendously informative, and a really useful image to keep in my sights.