अनिष्टमिष्टं मिश्रं च त्रिविधं कर्मणः फलम्।भवत्यत्यागिनां प्रेत्य न तु संन्यासिनां क्वचित्॥
aniṣṭam iṣṭaṃ miśraṃ ca tri-vidhaṃ karmaṇaḥ phalambhavaty atyāgināṃ pretya na tu sannyāsināṃ kvacit
Word by word
The verse says
Unwanted, wanted and mixed: the fruit of action comes in those three kinds, after death, for those who did not let go. For those who did, it never comes at all.
In plain words
A bookkeeping verse, and the third item is the honest one.
Results come as wanted, unwanted, or mixed. Most of life is the third, and it is rare to see anyone say so.
The clean win and the clean disaster are both unusual. What actually arrives is almost always tangled, which is exactly why the accounting is so hard to close.
Where you've felt this · with money
Your uncle took a transfer to another city twenty years ago for better money. The money was better. His children grew up away from their grandparents, and one of them now lives in that city and is happy there. Ask whether the move was a good decision and he will start an answer three times and not finish it.
Going deeper
The admission that most outcomes are mixed is what makes this more than bookkeeping.
We talk as though results sort into good and bad, which keeps the hope alive that if you choose carefully enough you can get the first kind. This verse puts a third category in, and in practice it is the biggest one. Almost everything you have ever done has produced some of each.
Which quietly explains why the ledger never closes. You cannot finish evaluating a decision whose results are still arriving and still mixed, so the mind keeps the file open for decades.
The release offered here is not that you will get better results. It is that the file can be closed anyway, because you were never the one keeping the account. That is a strange kind of relief, and it is the only one on offer.