Hey guys,
Jason here.
So a while back I was standing in the gas station line behind this older guy who was buying lottery tickets.
You guys all know these people.
He wasn't buying one,
Right?
He had a whole system,
Right?
Different numbers,
Different draws,
Encore,
No encore,
One ticket for this night,
Another for the weekend.
And this poor clerk was trying to keep track of everything while the line behind us was getting,
You know,
It was getting pretty big at this point.
And I could feel myself getting irritated because really all I wanted to do is pay for gas.
And that was it.
You know,
Tap the card,
Get the receipt and just book it.
But you know,
Instead I'm stuck behind a man apparently trying to negotiate directly with fate,
Right?
He'd hand the clerk the old ticket and the clerk would scan it.
Nothing.
And then he'd pull another one out of his wallet and then nothing again.
And then he bought more.
And I'm sitting there and I remember thinking,
Buddy,
You're not gonna win dude,
Like the odds of this are ridiculous.
You'd probably have a better chance of being struck by lightning while being attacked by a shark downtown,
Right?
So I don't know if that is mathematically accurate or not,
But that's the general thought I had at the time.
And I felt like slightly superior about it,
You know,
Like I understood probability.
And I think that's one of the ego's favorite little games,
Right?
It finds a stranger doing something we would never do and uses them to confirm,
You know,
How intelligent are we?
You know,
Look at this guy wasting his money.
Look at this woman making terrible choices.
Look at the person believing something so ridiculous.
You know,
Thank God that I'm not like them.
How many of us have said that,
Right?
And meanwhile,
We all have our own weird forms of hope that make no sense to anyone else,
Right?
So the man finally finished buying the tickets and instead of leaving,
He stood off to the side and he was like scratching one of those little instant win game things.
The line moved and,
You know,
I paid for my gas and I started putting my card away and I made some joke to the clerk about the lottery paying for the gas.
You know,
It was nothing mean or anything,
Just one of those little things to say,
Right?
And the older guy actually heard me and he laughed and he said,
Well,
That's the plan.
So hiya!
I looked over at him and I said,
You win anything?
And he said,
20 bucks once.
And then he smiled and he kind of added in,
But I've spent a hell of a lot of money,
More money than 20.
And at least he knew,
Right?
So I said something about,
Uh,
You know,
The odds being,
Being really terrible to win.
And,
Uh,
He,
He did agree and he wasn't like confused about that either.
And then he said,
You know,
I know I'm probably never,
Ever going to win and not,
Not really why I buy them in the first place.
So it caught me a little bit,
Right?
I mean,
Because you know,
What other reason would there be other than,
Than winning,
You know?
So he actually held up the ticket and he said,
You know,
Until I draw,
I get to think about what I do.
Until the actual draw,
He gets to think about it.
So he told me he had a daughter who was struggling.
Not a young daughter,
But a single mom working all the time.
Her rent was going up,
Car needs repairs,
The regular bullshit,
Right?
And the kind of problems that.
.
.
You know,
They're not dramatic enough to make the news,
But,
You know,
It's heavy enough to sit on somebody's chest every day.
I think we've been there.
He said when he bought a ticket,
He actually imagined calling her and telling her that the house was paid for.
And telling her she could get her car fixed and she didn't have to panic anymore about phone bills.
He imagined,
You know,
Like setting up things for the grandchildren later in life,
Uh,
Taking the family on a trip,
You know,
Nothing crazy or anything.
He wasn't going like outlandish.
He was imagining everybody he loved,
I guess,
Being safe.
And then he said,
You know,
For a couple of days,
It kind of feels possible.
And when he said that,
It changed a little bit for me,
Right?
You know,
The ticket was probably still worthless and the math definitely hadn't changed.
But he wasn't really buying the numbers to me anymore.
He was buying a few days in a world where,
You know,
His daughter was okay.
And I understood that,
You know,
Because I guess hope is strange,
Right?
Sometimes it's connected to realistic pain.
You know,
You save money,
Apply for a job,
Go to treatment,
Repair the relationship.
You know,
Do the work.
There's something you can actually build toward but you know sometimes hope is less practical than that I guess.
Sometimes it's a little imaginary room where we go because reality has become I guess almost too narrow.
A place where for 10 minutes the people we love are not struggling.
The diagnosis was wrong.
The phone call brings good news.
The person comes home.
The debt disappears.
We all have visited that room.
We just kind of,
I guess,
Buy different tickets.
You know,
Some people buy lottery tickets and.
.
.
Some people keep checking email,
They know probably will never come.
You know,
Some people,
They stay in relationships because they're still imagining the person going back to how it was maybe 10 years ago,
Right?
Some people apply to jobs,
You know,
Long after,
You know,
They're definitely not getting it.
Some people look for signs when people die.
It's easy to stand outside of another person's hope and call it stupid.
Maybe sometimes it is.
But hope can absolutely become denial at the same time.
It can keep us from accepting,
I guess,
What is true.
People lose years and years waiting for someone to change who has shown no interest in changing at all.
People spend money they can't afford,
They ignore medical issues that they have,
They confuse wanting something with evidence that it will never happen.
Hope is not automatically wise though,
Right?
But then again,
Neither is cynicism.
Cynicism gets completely mistaken for intelligence because it never risks being embarrassed.
And the cynic says nothing will work.
Nobody changes.
Everything's a scam.
People are selfish.
Life gets worse.
Eventually,
If you say no to everything,
You'll be right about something.
Then you can point it and say,
See,
I knew the whole time.
But cynicism also has really brutal odds,
Right?
It just doesn't print tickets the same way.
And I think a lot of us become cynical because hope once made us look Stupid.
You know,
We trusted somebody.
We believed something would work.
We thought life was turning around and then it collapsed.
And then after that,
We kind of decided it was safer to expect nothing.
No expectation,
Then there's obviously no disappointment.
And,
You know,
To me at one point in time,
And I think to most,
That did sound reasonable.
But it also closes the door on surprise,
Right?
I mean Ram Dass himself talked a lot about being in the present rather than living entirely inside the future.
And the lottery is almost pure future,
And the ticket itself is nothing.
It's just a little piece of paper.
The entire emotional power comes from what might happen later.
And that itself can become a trap.
You can spend your whole life waiting for the draw.
You know,
When the kids grow up,
When you retire,
When your health improves,
When everybody finally understands you,
When spirituality breaks through.
Whatever it is,
Right?
We keep buying tickets for a future moment that will allow us to,
I guess,
Begin living.
And sometimes the ticket loses and we buy another future.
So that is where hope becomes an escape.
But that man,
He kind of showed me another side of it,
Right?
His imagination wasn't only,
I guess,
Taking him away from the present.
It was showing him what he actually loved,
You know?
He didn't imagine himself being admired.
He imagined his daughter resting safe.
The fantasy exposed the shape of his heart.
And to me,
I think that really does matter.
Sometimes we daydream about,
You know,
Things that tell us what we're really longing for underneath all of the practical BS.
Maybe,
You know,
Maybe he could never buy his daughter a house,
But perhaps he could call her more often.
He could help her with the kids,
Pay one small bill here and there.
Uh,
Even listen to her when she was scared.
And,
You know,
Maybe,
Maybe the fantasy of the grand rescue could point toward smaller acts of love that were actually available.
Right.
And,
And that's,
That is a useful question.
When we catch ourselves dreaming about some huge future change,
What part of that dream can be lived right now?
You know,
You imagine being wealthy enough to help everybody.
Yeah.
Okay.
You help today without being wealthy,
Right?
You imagine having all this time in the world to spend with your children.
What are you doing with them with the 20 minutes that you have tonight?
You know,
It's like you imagine becoming spiritually peaceful.
But then ask yourself,
Can you be slightly less cruel in the next argument?
You know,
You imagine.
.
.
I guess traveling somewhere sacred,
But can you actually pay attention more just walking to the mailbox,
Right?
The dream itself doesn't need to be thrown away.
It can be translated,
Right?
The giant impossible version might contain some small possible action.
So,
You know,
I asked the man,
What would he do if he did actually win?
And he kind of laughed and he said,
Probably have a heart attack before I could actually spend it.
And then he looked down at the ticket again and he said,
But everybody would be looked after.
And that was the thing,
Right?
Everybody would be looked after.
And I realized that most of us aren't chasing money for money itself.
We're chasing what we believe money will allow us to stop feeling.
Right?
What is it?
Fear,
Dependence,
Humiliation,
The terror that somebody we love will need something that we can't provide.
Money becomes a symbol for safety.
The problem is not the amount that can completely deliver what we ask from it.
Money can pay rent,
Sure,
But it can't stop death.
It can fix the car,
But it can't make a family love one another,
Right?
But even the richest person eventually meets something money can't negotiate with.
And that is where the deeper practice actually begins.
The man scratched the rest of the ticket and he won nothing,
Right?
He folded it in half,
He threw it in the garbage,
And then he still had tickets for upcoming draws.
So the future remained open for him a little bit longer.
So he said goodbye and he left and I watched him walk across the parking lot and I kind of remember thinking he had probably spent money that he was never getting back.
And yeah,
That is so,
So true.
I no longer thought about.
.
.
He was a simply a stupid person?
I thought of him as carrying love,
Fear,
And helplessness in his wallet.
And the ticket gave those feelings somewhere to go.
I still don't buy lottery tickets at all.
I understand the odds completely and I think there are people who spend money on them that they genuinely need for other things,
Right?
There's no point in,
There's no actual point in romanticizing it.
But now when I see somebody standing at the counter,
Choosing numbers,
Taking up my time,
You know.
.
.
I start to wonder what world they're buying for the next three days.
Who gets rescued in it?
Who comes home?
Who finally rests?
And what fear disappears?
For a couple days each week,
I think he's living in a world where everybody is looked after and maybe teaching Maybe the teaching is not what we should believe.
Every impossible thing that will happen,
Maybe it is that we should pay attention to what we imagine doing.
If it actually did.
And I think that tells us something,
Right?
Sometimes fantasy is BS,
And sometimes it's an escape.
And then sometimes hidden inside it is the life our heart has been asking us to begin living right now.
Thanks for listening.
Namaste.
