Follow Natural Peaceful Paths through Every Living Day in this shared journey down natural paths of ease and calm.I couldn’t help but notice yesterday that Abraham Lincoln was sitting on the floor of my office. Not sure how he got there, but there he was in stern, familiar profile, staring off in the distance from the face of a penny. I could tell from a distance that his face was worn, rubbed soft by many years of hands. So I picked him up and read the date: 1953. This particular incarnation of Abraham Lincoln has been making quiet journeys around the world for fifty-seven years.
I rubbed his face for a moment, wishing I was better at massage. He did not seem inclined to tell me how he got into my office, or what his motives might be. (Even with revered politicians, it’s always best to check.) The mystery set me to wondering more deeply about the decades of his journeys, but across this world of wisdom, surveillance and databases, no one will ever have any idea where this particular penny has been. The creative game of www.wheresgeorge.com is a playful beginning with money tracking, but rudimentary. Only imagination can speculate. When the penny was new, it might’ve had enough value for significance in purchase. It might’ve helped buy Cold War essentials, then turned to being traded for a child’s candied solace. If I touched it in my own childhood, it probably helped buy baseball cards. Who knows how many times it helped balance a transaction of exacting finance? Did it ever participate in a financial crime? Was it tossed into the street, or ignored there until someone observant and frugal scooped it up? Where across the face of the planet has it reached? It’s been far more places than most people who’ve touched it, I’d wager. (Want to bet one cent?) The amount of stories irretrievably contained within that penny are beyond tally. Fifty-seven years is a long, long time, as anyone with arthritis or a bad job can tell you.
The notion of hidden stories set me to looking around my office again. I have no idea where my telephone was built, or who made it. The desk had its own life before reaching here, first as an oak tree somewhere, then in other lives before I found it on Craigslist. Many books on my shelf were first read by others I’ve never met. Every item with which we’re surrounded has stories, lives, meanings and feelings coded within that are permanently beyond reach. To avoid being sad about this, I had to surrender to the impossibility of knowing and to the beauty of mystery. I had to remember the question we were asked behind barbed wire and Defense Department security clearances when I was a young aerospace engineer: Do you have a Need to Know? It was a paranoid question then but is a wise one now. Too often our perceptions are cluttered with information that only obscures the purity of our aliveness. If I could explore every story within any penny I touch, I’d never get anything else done. The impossibility of knowing serves us as much as it hinders us.
Soothed, I looked around my office once more. Alas, I didn’t find any more money.
