For nearly 60 years now, I have been trying to make sense of this crazy world. Life certainly
has had it's ups and downs. But it has it's lessons too.
This website is about my life. But, on another level, it's about change. It's about the concept of
embracing change and also of effecting change in the world. You see, I am not one who believes that
we have to sit back and passively play the cards we are dealt. I believe it is possible to change
our conditions in life and also to change the world.
In my youth I was a political activist and thought that if we could just get the right person(s) in
office we could effect meaningful change in the world. That was back in the 1960s. I had to give
up on that. But I never gave up on the concept of change itself. Rather, I decided that if we
really want to change the world, well, change is an active verb and we we can't delegate the action
part of that to somebody else. If we really want to change the world all we have to do is roll our
sleeves up and go out there an do it.
I am convinced that if we take life one day at a time and always strive to contribute something,
in the end we will find that we left the world a little bit better than we found it. In other words,
we will have changed the world.
I always liked the starfish story. It tells about how there was a terrible storm one night, but it
broke and in the morning the sunrise revealed blue skys. A little boy decided to go for a walk
along the beach to enjoy the sunrise. But what he found there was appaling. The beach was
littered with thousands and thousands of starfish that had washed up during the storm. He realized
that as the sun rose these starfish were going to dry out and die.
So he did what he thought was the right thing to do. He started running down the beach picking up
the starfish and throwing them back into the surf.
As he was doing this he came across an old man who was also walking the beach. "Mister, Mister" the
boy pleaded "Can you help me save these starfish?" The old man looked at the boy and then he looked
down the beach. And then he laughed. He laughed and said "Son, there must be ten thousand starfish
on this beach, and you are just one little boy. What you are doing is so small, so insignificient
it means nothing at all."
The boy reflected on that for a few seconds, then looked at the starfish he had in his hand and flung
it as far into the sea as he could.
"I think it meant something to that starfish.", he said.
This website is about change, technological change, social change, personal change. But it is also
about stories, for these are the stories of my life.
You see, It all started when I was just a wee lad....
| Home | Next |
