समदुःखसुखः स्वस्थः समलोष्टाश्मकाञ्चनः।तुल्यप्रियाप्रियो धीरस्तुल्यनिन्दात्मसंस्तुतिः॥
sama-duḥkha-sukhaḥ sva-sthaḥ sama-loṣṭāśma-kāñcanaḥtulya-priyāpriyo dhīras tulya-nindātma-sanstutiḥ
Word by word
The verse says
The same in pain and in pleasure, resting in himself; the same toward a clod of earth, a stone, and gold; the same toward what is liked and disliked; steady; the same under blame and praise —
In plain words
Sva-sthaḥ — standing in oneself. It is the ordinary Sanskrit word for being well.
A healthy person, in this language, is one who is where they are.
Then the list of pairs, and the third one names the clod before the gold, which is not the order you would choose.
Where you've felt this · in study
Your father was genuinely poor until he was thirty-five and comfortable afterwards. He handles both with the same lack of ceremony. He is not making a point about materialism. The two states stopped being different kinds of thing somewhere in the middle, and nobody could tell you when.
Going deeper
Being well, in this language, means standing in yourself — and the whole verse is an unpacking of that one word.
Sva-stha is what you would say about somebody recovering from an illness. Its literal sense is self-situated. That the same word does duty for health and for this state is not a coincidence in the language; it reflects a view in which being unwell and being pulled about by circumstances are versions of the same displacement.
Chapter 12 gave almost this exact list, and the overlap is deliberate.
What the earth-and-gold pairing adds is a check against a comfortable reading. Being even about praise and blame can be managed by anybody with some dignity. Being genuinely even about a stone and a piece of gold is a much larger claim, and the verse states it without softening, in the middle of a list of things most readers will recognise more easily.