Happy New Year!
In 2010 I resolve to lose weight, get my finances in order, paint the bedrooms, clean the garage and stay in touch with all my friends and family who aren’t on Facebook. Oh, and do my best to edit a newspaper that informs, entertains and provides our readers with the news overview needed to make informed decisions about the future of our coastal communities.
If you’ve driven past our office on nights and weekends, you know we are committed to this effort and spend a lot of hours putting out this publication. So many hours, in fact, that my list of resolutions looks an awful lot like the same list I had for 2009!
Still, I’ve been struck this year by how many of our readers and advertisers do find the time to make things happen: sometimes with grand gestures, sometimes with tiny efforts and most commonly by committing a significant amount of their personal time to making a difference in their community.
These efforts remind me of the legend of the starfish — the story of how a boy walking along the shore one morning is focused on gently tossing beached starfish back into the ocean when a man stops and chides him for thinking he is doing any good, since there are thousands and thousands of starfish on the shore and he could never reach and save them all.
The boy responds by picking up another starfish, and placing it gently into the sea. He smiles, turns to the man and says, “Oh, I don’t know about that. I made a difference for that one.”
So as we all make our new year’s resolutions, let’s plan to sift through myriad daily time demands and find one small thing we can accomplish. Maybe we can’t save the world in 2010 — or clean the garage, or lose weight, or paint the bedrooms — but if we ignore the chiding of the naysayers, maybe, like the boy on the beach, we can find satisfaction in each little difference we make.
— Mary Kate Leming, editor
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