The Hundred Dollars

What's the difference between skeptics and cynics? Healthy skepticism is another way to say critical discernment, something necessary to get past, say, a timeshare salesman unscathed or beyond the "you have won" headline down to the not-so-fast fine print. But cynicism, it has been said, is a deep sickness of the soul. Many people have taken their skepticism too close to cynicism by making judgments from a fortress of denial, in which anything that doesn't make sense to a "rational" world view must be suspect. It's worth keeping in mind that because what we personally "know" constantly changes, and because the world does too, the truth is multifaceted and always shifting. It lies somewhere between total gullibility and absolute doubt.

All this is a long way of introducing the hundred dollars. Some years ago I was walking in a local park, bemoaning some fate or another, wondering whether all the talk of affirmations and positive thinking had much credence. I hadn't had much luck with them so far. "Okay," I said to the Universe, willing to take another gamble. "Show me if anyone is listening, if what I say matters. I'll take . . . hmmm . . . I'll take a hundred bucks."

I went home and forgot about it until the next day, when a birthday card from my mother arrived a week early. Inside was a check for $100. This didn't count, because she always sent $100 for my birthday, and I could have guessed it was coming.

A couple of days later, I received a letter from Fine Gardening magazine about an inquiry I'd made some time ago. They wanted to buy a single photograph I had submitted (rather unusual for slide submissions), and enclosed was a check for $125. My eyebrows arched in a possible concession. Did this count? I told myself that although I didn't know their payment would be in the hundred dollar range, I had been pretty confident that they would buy it. (Why? Most other photographs of mine weren't so lucky.)

The piece de resistance came later that week. As an admin at the law school, I occasionally helped one of the professors with personal tasks, like faxing and phone calling for non-work purposes. Unbeknownst to me, university policy stated that such work should be compensated separately, and from the professor's own pocket. Thus it was that Professor Burke handed me a check for $100 that Friday before I went home. "For all your extra help," he said, explaining the policy.

"Okay, okay," I said to the Universe after this third show of abundance. "I get it." It was hard to rationalize how all this had happened, and in such a short time. The birthday card may have been a given, but the other two were not. The third one wasn't even on the radar.

So do I fully believe in the Law of Attraction, and all that is good will come if you let it? Absolutely not. That's the gullible end of the spectrum. Unpleasant things happen to all of us despite our best affirmations and intentions. But the opposite end is no place to hang out either. It's the duality see-saw again. Energy expended in service of any extreme, be it ideas or behavior, is usually fueled by its unconscious opposite: methinks the skeptics protest too much. (What did Buddha say about The Middle Way?) Which is another way of saying that underneath every cynic is a wounded idealist.

As for the hundred dollars, wouldn't you know that I couldn't leave it alone. I went to the same park a few weeks later and raised my arms to the sky. "So," I bargained with the Universe. "I could use a few thousand bucks…."