One At A Time

A friend of ours was walking down a deserted Mexican beach at sunset. As he walked along, he began to see another man in the distance. As he grew nearer, he noticed that the local native kept leaning down, picking something up and throwing it out into the water. Time and again he kept hurling things out into the ocean.

As our friend approached even closer, he noticed that the man was picking up starfish that had been washed up on the beach and, one at time, he was throwing them back into the water.

Our friend was puzzled. He approached the man and said, "Good evening, friend. I was wondering what you are doing."

"I'm throwing these starfish back into the ocean. You see, it's low tide right now and all of these starfish have been washed up onto the shore. If I don't throw them back into the sea, they'll die up here from lack of oxygen."

"I understand," my friend replied, "but there must be thousands of starfish on this beach. You can't possibly get to all of them. There are simply too many. And don't you realize this is probably happening on hundreds of beaches all up and down this coast. Can't you see that you can't possibly make a difference?"

The local native smiled, bent down and picked up yet another starfish, and as he threw it back into the sea, he replied, "made a difference to that one!"

By Jack Canfield and Mark V. Hansen
from Chicken Soup for the Soul
Copyright 1993 by Jack Canfield
and Mark Victor Hansen

ဆရာေဖျမင့္ ဘာသာျပန္ခဲ့တဲ့ ႏွလံုးသားအာဟာရ ဆိုတဲ့ စာအုပ္ထဲမွာ ပါတဲ့ ဇာတ္လမ္းေလးတစ္ပုဒ္ပါ။ အဲဒီစာအုပ္ေလးကို ဆယ္တန္းေအာင္ၿပီး Universityေတြ ပိတ္ထားခ်ိန္မွာ အားေနတာနဲ႕ ဖတ္ျဖစ္ခဲ့မိတယ္။ အေတာ္ေလးကို အာဟာရေတြ ေပးစြမ္းႏိုင္တဲ့ စာအုပ္ေလးပါ။

အခုဇာတ္လမ္းေလးက ၾကယ္ငါးေကာက္တယ္... ၾကယ္ငါးေကာက္တယ္... လို႕ လူမႈေရးလုပ္ငန္းေတြမွာ ညႊန္းဆိုဖြဲ႕တဲ့အထိ ျဖစ္ေစခဲ့တဲ့ ဇာတ္လမ္းေကာင္းေလး တစ္ပုဒ္ပါ။ ဒီဇာတ္လမ္းကို ျမန္မာလို႕ ဖတ္ဖူးတဲ့ သူေတြအတြက္လည္း မူရင္းအေရးအသားျဖစ္တဲ့ အဂၤလိပ္လိုေရးထားတာကို ထပ္မံဖတ္ေစခ်င္သလို... မဖတ္ရေသးတဲ့ သူေတြကိုလည္း ဖတ္ေစခ်င္တဲ့အတြက္ ဇူလုိင္အိမ္မက္မွာ ကူးယူတင္ျပလိုက္ပါတယ္ ခင္ဗ်ာ။

ဘ၀ကမ္းေျခတစ္ေလွ်ာက္မွာ ဟိုဟိုဒီဒီ ေလွ်ာက္လွမ္းရင္း ႏိုင္သေလာက္ ၾကယ္ငါးေကာက္တဲ့ လူေတြ ရိွၾကသလို... အေပၚက ပံုေလးလို ကမ္းေျခတေလွ်ာက္မွာ တင္ေနတဲ့ ၾကယ္ငါးေတြက အမ်ားႀကီးပါကြာ... ဒီတစ္ေကာင္ေလး ေကာက္မိတာနဲ႕ ေဂဟစနစ္ႀကီးမွာ ပိုမထူးပါဘူးကြာ ဆုိၿပီး ေတြ႕ေနတဲ့ ၾကယ္ငါးေလးကို မေကာက္ပဲ ေရွ႕ဆက္ေလွ်ာက္တဲ့ လူေတြလည္း ရိွၾကမွာပါ။ ျဖစ္ႏိုင္ရင္ေတာ့ လူတိုင္း ႏိုင္သေလာက္ေလး ၾကယ္ငါးေတြ ေကာက္ေစခ်င္တယ္ဗ်ာ။