What about the missing dollar?

Have ever wondered about the story about the missing dollar? Well in a shorter version of the story, three friends go to a restaurant and order food worth $30. They pay the waiter $30 each contributing $10. The waiter takes the money to the cashier, the cashier decides to give $5 discount. The waiter keeps $2 and gives $3 back to the three friends. The three friends split it i.e. $1 each. Now looking back at the problem, each friend paid only $9 i.e. $27 total and the waiter kept $2 for himself so that total is $29 as opposed to $30. So where is the missing dollar?

The answer is very simple but requires us to look at each aspect carefully. I guess this is probably the math that we employ in our lives too. Though there is nothing missing, we always look into it and wish for that one thing that would make it perfect. Now under this premise we look forward for lot of things in life hoping that one day that missing dollar will magically appear. Some go a bit farther and anticipate the occurrence of finding missing dollar. This can be seen in two different aspects i.e. hope and desperation. Hope is the most wonderful and powerful aspect of human thinking, while desperation and defeat is a complete opposite.

In a grander scheme of things, hope creates illusions as well as opportunities to explore something really new. It also makes some people adamant so foolish in their beliefs that life itself is based on the hope. Yet it is this hope that keeps most of us alive. Hope does have magical power of curing the most dreadful ailments. On the other hand, there is defeated attitude, a feeling that the missing dollar would never appear. Of course it wouldn’t, coz there is none missing. This attitude is the biggest hurdle to the human civilization, perhaps not as deadly as having foolish hope.

In either case we lose rationality and act in a very contrary way. As easy as it seems we are in most cases in one of these either states. The time that we are not in these states are when we actually look at the “missing dollar” problem and see that there is no missing dollar. If actual payments and receipts are added everything is normal. For this clarity to occur you either need to have prior information to act upon it, or an aptitude to look beyond the problem. This is well depicted in the movie “Patch adams” in the part “How many fingers here”.

Well, again in theory that does a little bit optimistic huh!!!