The Brahmin's Castle of Rice

A poor brahmin, living entirely on whatever alms he could beg each day, was once given a generous pot of rice flour by a kind household. Delighted, he hung the pot on a peg above his sleeping mat and lay down beneath it, beginning to dream of all the ways he might use it.

If he sold the flour, he calculated, he could buy a few goats. The goats would breed into a flock, which he could sell for cows, and the cows would breed into a herd, which he could trade for land, and the land would make him wealthy enough to marry a beautiful wife, who would bear him a fine son. And if that son ever disobeyed him, he decided, growing more agitated by the second in his imagined future, he would discipline him firmly with a stick — and here, swinging his arm to demonstrate exactly how he would strike his imaginary future son, the brahmin's hand struck the real pot hanging above him, shattering it and scattering the rice flour across the floor.

He sat in the wreckage of both his pot and his elaborate fantasy, understanding too late that wealth imagined and celebrated before it is ever actually earned can vanish just as easily as it was conjured — and that a mind lost entirely in castles of the future often fails to notice the very real, very breakable present sitting right above its head.