Welcome

Hi and welcome

I’ve been trying to think how best to describe what this site is going to be about, what I hope to do with it. After a while I suddenly remembered a short story I had read a while back and I realised at once it was the perfect way to introduce you to what I am going to be doing on RikTalavera.com.

Here’s the story:

A man was walking along a beach, reflecting on his life. He had always wanted to make a difference, but no matter what he tried, he wound up feeling as though he was spitting into the wind.

Suddenly, the man heard a loud “crunch” and looked down at his feet. Right where he was standing, and for as far as he could see in every direction, there were thousands and thousands of tiny starfish washed up onto the shore by the ocean waves and tides.

The man continued walking, thinking to himself about the apparent cruelty of the ocean. After all, those starfish hadn’t done anything wrong! Yet before the day was done, they would be dead, washed up on the shore and left to die.

After a time, the man came across an old woman standing at the ocean’s edge, throwing starfish that had washed up on the shore back into the sea.

When he asked her what she was doing, she said she had always wanted to make a difference, and she had decided that today was a good day to start.

The man looked at the woman then back to the thousands upon thousands of starfish that lay dying along the coastline and said, “For every starfish you throw back into the ocean, three more wash up onto the shore! How can you possibly make a difference?”

The old woman looked thoughtful for a moment, then she picked up another starfish and threw it back into the ocean.

She turned to the man, smiled the most beautiful smile he had ever seen and simply said, “Made a difference to that one!”

I can’t sum it up any better than that, suffice it to say I was the man. Always thinking he could make a difference but never doing anything about it because he believed the odds to be so stacked against him, what was the point? Then, like the man, I also had a sudden dose of realisation. I too “met that old woman on the shore”.

I had always wanted things to be absolutely perfect before I started anything. Everything had to be 100% right. Which of course is completely stupid. Nothing is ever 100% perfect. I was waiting for the number of starfish to be so few, and so perfectly aligned, it would take but a few minutes to throw them all back into the ocean and my work would be done. I thought I wanted the “quick fix”.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that, and it took me a long time to realise that there’s no such thing.

It doesn’t matter how many starfish are out there. It doesn’t matter how quickly you throw them back.  How many you can throw back. What truly matters is that you simply start, take some action, no matter how small. Even if you only throw one back, you’ve still made a difference. By waiting for perfection, by thinking that you can’t make any difference at all, all you achieve is nothing.

So here I am, picking up the starfish and throwing them back into the ocean. It’s time to act, time to give something back, time to start helping others as others have helped me. It’s time to Pay It Forward!

I will be filling out this site with as much useful information as I can and I hope that what you find here not only helps you as a “starfish” but also takes you to a place, if you are not already there, where you too can start picking up the other starfish.

Take care and I look forward to talking and meeting you soon.

Rik

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