Lottery

What would you do if you won the lottery?

“You have a right to action, but never to the fruits of action.”— Bhagavad Gita 2.47

There was a man who believed money would one day arrive like lightning—sudden, loud, and unquestionable. He bought lottery tickets not out of joy, but out of fear dressed as hope.

Each ticket was a small promise to himself that effort alone might not be enough, that luck could do what discipline felt too slow to achieve.He spoke often of hills he would one day live on, wide skies, easy mornings. What he did not see—what he never paused long enough to notice—was that his family was already living on that hill. They were eating together, breathing together, surviving together. The view was modest, but it was real.

Time moved on as it always does, indifferent to dreams written on slips of paper. The man grew tired. His breath became heavy.

When he finally left this world, money did not follow him, nor did the tickets he once believed in.

What remained were memories, judgments, relief for some, anger for others, and prayers spoken every evening for thirty-one days by the people who had stayed.Among the living, questions lingered.

Why had he trusted chance more than care? Why had he tried to manage life with dreams instead of presence? Yet the answers no longer mattered to the man who was gone.

They mattered only to those still holding the steering wheel, sometimes feeling—strangely—that his hands were there too, guiding, watching, learning too late.In time, the story softened.

It stopped being about foolishness and started becoming a lesson. Those who reflected on it understood that sudden wealth, if it ever arrives, reveals a person rather than rescues them.

A wise winner would not shout their fortune into the world or build castles overnight. They would move quietly, securing what is necessary, helping without spectacle, and anchoring themselves so money does not become another form of loss.

The man had chased luck, but left behind clarity. And clarity, once seen, does not fade.

“Better is one’s own duty, though imperfect, than the duty of another well performed.”— Bhagavad Gita 3.35

Some people spend their lives looking for hills to climb, never realizing they were already standing on one.