Have you ever noticed a penny lying on the floor and not bothered to pick it up? Even though the old adage says “Find a penny, Pick it up, All day long you’ll have good luck.” And yet you inherently know that a penny isn’t worth that much, so you pass it by without a second thought. In fact, if someone ever said to you “A penny for your thoughts,” you would probably insist on getting at least a dollar before you responded. (Am I right?)Even when a penny falls out of your pocket, you never bother to pick it up. You just leave it wherever it lands. Over by the bookcase, next to the bathtub, caught between the floorboards. You see them all the time, lying in their place, waiting to be picked up. You mean to pick them up. You tell yourself to pick them up. But you don’t. They’re just not worth enough to you. So you leave them lying there. Alone, abandoned, gathering dust. Is this just a case of laziness on your part, or do you perhaps have a serious issue with anti-penny-ism?
All kidding aside, what if this act of defiance against copper currency actually represented a much bigger problem? What if ignoring the penny is really our way of procrastinating against something we don’t want to deal with? As if it’s showing us that we aren’t attentive to the little things. I mean, if we can’t even bend down to pick up a penny off the floor, what does that say about the other little “issues” in our life that we’re ignoring?
So the pennies start to pile up. They become a sort of physical manifestation of our chaotic state of mind. The more pennies we see, the more we probably need to resolve some kind of conflict in our life. And until we confront the problem, there will always be pennies lying around to remind us. That’s why it’s so hard to pick them up. It means facing our demons.
Anyway, it’s just a theory. It probably doesn’t work with dimes or quarters, though. And definitely not with Susan B. Anthony dollars.
