Saving seashells, story of changing the world

This is a great story of subjectivity. I have included it as a final message in the book "What is time?" However, as it is a concise book on time, I did not include any explanation. Here, I will narrate the story and we can then look into the message of it.

Saving Seashells.

Once upon a time there were two friends. One of them lived in the cost. And the second one lived in the mainland visited his friend one day. As it occured previous day there had been a storm and rough sea had brought lot of sea animals washed ashore. And hundreds of seashells were lying across the shore.

When the boy visited his friend, he was on the beach. Noticed him far away getting down to pick up something and throw at the sea. After watching sometime and approaching him he noticed that the friend was picking up seashells to return them to the sea. And it looked absurd, there were thousands of them.

He spoke, "Hello friend, what are you doing? this fine morning?"

I am saving seashells. He replied.

Do you think you can save all of them? There are thousands of them! nomatter how fast you do it doesn't matter, you would never save them all.

That is true, he answered and yet again bent down, picked another shell and threw it at the sea and said, "It mattered to that one though!"

Seashells:https://unsplash.com/@erin1592

Morals of the story -On changing the world.

In Act of charity

Obvious moral of the story is, we do not have to worry about end results when we start doing something in changing the world. As long as our intentionas and attitudes are pure, the action how big or small would not matter. And obviously the gates of the heven is not opening to anyone depending on how many seashells we would save. So, when we talk about charity, one seashell matters. One dollar of donation matters. One act of kindness matters.

In Action in general

We can also, derive some better rules for anything that we do. Again, it doesn't have to be charity. "One step at a time" is a good rule to follow in anything that we do. And I have wrtten about this in Mike Posner article, how he took one step at a time, when he walked across america. Anything that looks monumental, mega scale, is started with one step. It may be a single idea in a isolated peaceful mind, most of the time.

Winter : https://unsplash.com/@drosie

Subjectivity of the world

We can also derive another meaning from the story, and it is to look at the world from the subjective aspect of it. Imagine you are a shell, waiting to be saved by these higher powers of the God, called humans. And it doesn't matter thousands of similar ones who are waiting on the shore. The God's would not even have time to reach you. Yet what matters for you is your liberation. Not your neighbours, not your daughters, not your parents. And this can be labelled as selfishness. But I like to label this as a will, a will for survival. And this is the most likely source of the driving force for the life itself. What is more important to understand is, the world obviously is not something created and persist outside individual seashell consciousness. As for individual seashell, the existance would cease to exist when they are dead. We are just like individual seashells waiting to be saved on the shore.

Have you ever thought about this?