The Pressed Penny Paradox
Head Prefect, Zara, reflects on life’s paradoxes, using a pressed penny to highlight growth, challenges, and success.
Each week, our student leaders share their insights with their peers in Assembly.
During my summer holiday, I went with my family on a little adventure to Japan. On Christmas Day, we went to Disneyland and purchased a little souvenir, a pressed penny.
If you aren’t familiar, a pressed penny is usually localised to popular tourist attractions. You insert money into a machine, crank a handle, and out comes what was once a coin, now transformed into another coin, but this time inscribed with pictures, words, characters, symbols, etc.
To me, this penny symbolises my holiday break—not just this most recent one but every holiday I’ve had for several years. For me, a penny is a metaphor for hundreds of hours and experiences in my life.
The holiday season and New Year period serve as an uncomfortable paradox. Why? During the holidays, I go through periods of altitudinous happiness.
As I do, I’m sure a lot of you spend time with friends and family—conversing and gossiping, playing sports, eating food, and trying new things. We also see our friends on social media sharing their highlights. A predominant factor of the holidays is time. We have time to relax, to prioritise ourselves, and to unwind. Each summer holiday, I am afforded the time to look back on the past 12 months with some perspective—noticing how I’ve grown and how I’ve had successes and failures.
Undoubtedly, this positive outlook is stopped short. But why, when the holidays should be full of positive vibes? Because, from reminiscing about the past, I move on to worrying about the future.
Herein lies my paradox—the holiday paradox, the pressed penny paradox, the life paradox. On one side of the coin, there is beautiful, shiny artwork. This side symbolises how we celebrate, thrive, feel our best, and have fun. This is what the paradigms of our time point us towards—we should have a good life, so why ever experience anything bad?
It’s the other side of my coin that we can be afraid of. This side has a dull lustre—no captivating intricacies, even some scratches. This side is a space where time isn’t in my favour. Here, it no longer feels like a luxury—I have far too much time to spend with my own thoughts.
My thoughts on this side may be different from yours—how your penny relates to you and your life paradoxes.
On this side of the coin, I am scared to grow up. I am terrified that my future isn’t a single straight path, with structure in place. You may be nervous to start a new school year—maybe because 韩国AV is new, maybe because you have new teachers, new classes. You might feel pressure to do well, especially the Years 11 and 12 students. Maybe you are worried about the job or promotion you wanted. You may feel as though others around you have it figured out—but you only see their shiny side. These are hard paradigms to live with congruently.
Yes, I have labelled this the holiday paradox—a time when you should relax but can still feel uneasy—but really, it is a penny of exponential wisdom. It applies to everything.
So how can I, and you, bring this back and make sense of all of this? There is a shiny side to the penny, where you will radiate and do what you do best. But this side of the penny, when it's pressed, can’t be made unless the other side is dull. But this is where the growth happens. This is needed for the other side to exist—light and dark, yin and yang—a required cohesion.
Holidays aren’t always highlights and peaks, nor is life. Life isn’t about finding perfection; it's about seeing an imperfect life perfectly. You are allowed to be comfortable being uncomfortable. It's okay to embrace that balance—tilting back and forth, even balancing on that axis. It's okay to not have everything figured out. I’ve never met anyone who does.
And don’t for one minute ever compare your penny to someone else’s. Those machines never make exact replicas. And I promise that as long as I’m here, you’ll have at least one person on this earth who is proud of your penny and will support you no matter what.
Welcome back, have a lovely year, and I can’t wait to see what you and your pressed penny accomplish this year.