The Lesson of the Quarter

It's a question I've come up against on several intelligence tests now. If you flip a quarter four times, and it comes up heads all four time, assuming that it is a normal quarter, what is the chance that it will come up tails when it is flipped the fifth time?

When I first heard this question, my mind set to work trying to figure it out, and I started encountering all sorts of mathematical calculations. A friend of mine who had heard the question put as well came up with the answer immediately, and I admit, I felt pretty dumb.

The answer of course is that the quarter has a 50% chance of coming up tails, just like it did every other time it was flipped. And my friend then stated the obvious, "the quarter doesn't remember how many times it's been flipped!"

The quarter has no memory. It is always in the ever present "now". It can't go back and reason out that it's high time it came up tails as opposed to heads, or be predisposed against coming up tails and try for heads. It can't do that. It can only succumb to the whims of gravity, rotation, and chance, and only God knows for certain how it will land.

In assuming that the previous flips had any bearing on the question at hand, I was doing something that only human beings do. I was bringing the past into the matter at hand when it had no business being there.

Human beings in general like to dwell in or on one of two places, either the past or the future, and we filter the present through either the way things have been or the way we would like them to be. If we would sit and look honestly at the present situation we would realize that the past is done and gone and no present situation will present itself exactly like anything which has happened before. We would also realize that the future hasn't happened yet, and is integrally tied with the choices we make in the here and now, for better or worse. But we don't think like that.

In my own situation which I am facing now, I have realized that I am allowing everything which has happened to me in the past, either good or bad, influence how I react to the present, and it is producing within me all sorts of negative reactions because of the memories associated with it. But the truth of the matter is that the situation is different, as each moment in time is unique to itself, and the factors of the equation have changed significantly. But because it resembles the same scenario, I drag all of that back out and try and apply it to something which it has no bearing on.

The quarter has no memory of such things. It flips and lands with the same chance that it had every other time because it is focused in and on the present moment. One could argue that this is because the quarter has no mind to remember with. Sometimes, I think, we need to follow the quarter's example and leave our own minds behind.

Leaving the past in the past is tough. Letting the future be the future can be even tougher. We tend to pin our hopes and dreams in either one, not realizing that we live in neither. I think that we also need to realize that we don't meet or experience God in the past or the future. We experience Him in the here and now. "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." This could be paraphrased as "The Kingdom of God is right here, right now."

The quarter doesn't spend time remembering the failures or successes of the past. It also doesn't spend time hoping that it will get a better result with future flips. It is only focused on the one flip, in the moment, right here and right now.