Another Day to Do Good
October 19, 2017
Today’s another day to do good. The Buddha often emphasized the fact that we shouldn’t take our days for granted, we shouldn’t take our opportunities to do good for granted.
Sometimes the things we do here get monotonous, they just become one more daily chore. But you have to remember, here’s your chance to do good. You’ve got another day to do good. We don’t know how many more days we’re going to have, but we do have today.
So whether you’re here, whether you’re traveling, whether you’re home, wherever you are, it’s a day to do good. Ask yourself: What kind of good would you like to do today? Some things you have to do because they’re part of your duties. But then on top of that, what would you like to do to make today special? In that way, things become less mechanical. If you’re just going through the motions, then you’re doing good but you’re not getting as much goodness out of it.
Learn to appreciate the fact that you can be generous, you can be virtuous, you can train the mind, all of which are really good things to do. It’s not the case that we always have that opportunity to do all those kinds of things. We can always train the mind but there are times when you get really sick and there’s not much energy in the mind, so it’s hard to do a lot. You can fight as much as you want against the situation, but still the opportunity to make real progress to do something really good can seem pretty small.
We’re healthy, we’re still strong, strong enough to do the good that we would like to do, so go ahead and do it. Don’t let the opportunity pass you by. Even though time keeps coming at us—there’s always more than enough time in the world—but opportunities don’t always come. The opportunities are here now, so appreciate that fact.
Take some joy in the fact that here’s another day to do good. You’re a human being, you’re in a place where it’s easy to practice. Even when you’re in places where it’s not easy to practice, at least you’re a human being, you can do something good with that.
As the ajaans in Thailand like to say, you’ve got the treasure of a human birth, and at the very least you want to maintain that treasure. Even better, you want to translate it into the treasure of, say, a heavenly birth. Or even better, translate it into the treasure of nibbana. The treasures are there for you to find, it’s simply a matter of taking the opportunity, making the most of the opportunity to find them.