I acquired a one-dollar bill the other day. Well, sort of.

To be anal retentive (precise—however you want to boil it down) it was three-quarters of a dollar bill.

What the hell happened to it? I don't know... but now I have it.

No worries, I have some laundry to do; I’ll just use it to purchase some quarters, and there you go: problem solved.

Wait a second—this is a problem. How does that work? Is that three-quarters of a dollar bill still worth one dollar? What's the mysteriously missing one quarter worth?

I mean, if you want to get down to brass tacks: neither side of this torn bill of currency, is worth a damn thing. A fresh, unused one dollar bill is worth nothing. It's a fancy piece of cotton and paper that represents currency backed up by gold (which unfortunately isn’t the case, either, now; gold no longer backs up our currency). Money, or currency if you prefer, is the largest mutual make-believe game that we, as adults, play on a daily basis. We pretend money is worth something, with each other... and quite frankly, we really go balls deep when it comes to how hard we play this game, and how deeply we subscribe to this notion—so much so, that it’s no longer a game. As a continued thought experiment, how many of you would do this with a large pile of money?

I wouldn't.

We are born and raised into a society that plays make believe about a lot of things. Off the top of my head, land property is another, but we can save that for another day. Let's just all agree that money is fictitious—or not. I’d prefer you decide that on your own. Either way though, currency is used as a representation of natural resource, which by extension, is rare, and is henceforth, valuable.

But we all don't know whether or not we like to pretend about this. We just do.

We buy things with it. I mean, here I am with three-quarters of a dollar bill, at a quarter machine at the laundromat, trying to buy four quarters with three quarters of a dollar bill—and you know what? The machine is not fooled. It won't take the three-quarter dollar bill. It just keeps spitting it back out at me. I don't blame the machine. It has one job, and it does it well.

I realize that I am left with few recourse, and that perhaps I must do what was done before, if I were to continue the journey of this three-quarter dollar bill: I must give it to someone else. Whether it be used as tender in a transaction, or by simply giving the partial bill of tender as a gift to someone else. I mean, I could burn it, but that sounds silly for some reason.

So I do the former. I move its journey forward throughout the world. I am no longer concerned with the ramifications mentioned previously, or all the over-thinking I just did moments ago (as much fun as that is for me—deeply and truly). Instead, my curiosity lingers on where it will end up next, and where it has been. All the people it has touched. How it came to be as it is. Where it will go. How it will be used. Sure, it's not a complete one dollar bill. Maybe it's the perfect representation of me, or you: a human being.

Incomplete.

Worth something.

Just moving our way through the world the best we can.

Touching as many people as we can.

Trying to be helpful.

Until we are of no further use.

Perhaps we are all three-quarters of a dollar bill.

And our worth? It's left to our own imagination.

- Mike