One Sunday morning, a wealthy man sat in his balcony enjoying sunshine and his coffee when a little ant caught his eye which was going from one side to the other side of the balcony carrying a big piece of leaf several times more than its size. The man watched it for more than an hour. He saw that the ant faced many impediments during its journey, paused, took a diversion and then continued towards its destination.

At one point the tiny creature came across a crack in the floor. It paused for a little while, analyzed and then laid the huge piece of leaf over the crack, walked over it, picked it on the other side and continued its journey.

The man was captivated by the cleverness of the ant, one of God’s tiniest creatures. The incident left the man in awe and forced him to contemplate over the miracle of creation. It showed the greatness of the Creator. In front of his eyes there was this tiny creature of God, lacking in size yet equipped with a brain to analyze, contemplate, reason, explore, discover and overcome. Along with all these capabilities, the man also noticed that this tiny creature shared some human shortcomings.

The man saw about an hour later the creature had reached its destination – a tiny hole in the floor which was entrance to its underground dwelling. It was at this point that the ant’s shortcoming that it shared with the man was revealed. How could the ant carry into the tiny hole the large piece of leaf that it had managed to carefully bring to the destination? It simply couldn’t!

So the tiny creature, after all the painstaking and hard work and exercising great skills, overcoming all the difficulties along the way, just left behind the large piece of leaf and went home empty-handed.

The ant had not thought about the end before it began its challenging journey and in the end the large piece of leaf was nothing more than a burden to it. The creature had no option, but to leave it behind to reach its destination. The man learned a great lesson that day.

Isn’t that the truth about our lives?

We worry about our family, we worry about our job, we worry about how to earn more money, we worry about where we should live – 5 bedroom or 6 bedroom house, what kind of vehicle to buy – a Mercedes or BMW or a Porsche, what kind of dresses to wear, all sorts of things, only to abandon all these things when we reach our destination – the grave. We don’t realize in our life’s journey that these are just burdens that we are carrying with utmost care and fear of losing them, only to find that at the end they are useless and we can’t take them with us.

Remember: The money that we earn doesn’t belong to us; only that which we actually spend belongs to us.

When we die, we leave intact all our monetary riches for others to desire and fight over.

What stays behind is only the fragrance of the good use of the honest wealth we acquire.

What we take with us are only our karma-s (actions), whether positive or negative, spiritual knowledge we gained and spiritual practices we did.

The real measure of a man’s wealth is what he has invested in ETERNITY.

All of us come with our own destiny and we live and have our quota of experiences as per our destiny. Nobody actually does anything for anyone. Everyone gives to or takes from this world and other beings what he or she is destined to — nothing more, nothing less.

So there is no point in worrying about anything. What we need to do is to discharge our duties to the best of our abilities in the present moment and leave the rest to Him. He is an efficient manager. Let Him manage everything.

Be carefree — not careless.