21.08.2026
The money doesn't reach
Past sixty I ended up living in a van.
It all fell at once with the pandemic: the lectures, the seminars, the book selling. No income, and at that age you don’t get back up fast.
Those months I learned something about money that I hadn’t learned in forty years of voluntary renunciation: having nothing because you left it is not the same as having nothing because it was taken from you. The first is a decision. The second is fear, all day, in your stomach.
The ancient text below doesn’t promise abundance. Worth knowing before you read on: anyone who promises you abundance is selling you something.
It promises a good deal less, and that’s why I believed it:
But those who worship Me with devotion, meditating on My transcendental form—to them I carry what they lack and preserve what they have.
Bhagavad-gītā 9.22. 1972 edition.
What you lack and what you already have. Two things, and neither of them is what you want.
I had a van, two hands and forty years of trade. It turned out to be enough, though for months it didn’t look like it. What never arrived was the money I had worked out I needed.
What the verse changed wasn’t the bank balance: it was that I stopped doing the sums all day.