As Days & Nights Fly Past
November 25, 2023
Let’s meditate for a bit. There’s a question the Buddha has us ask every day: “Days and nights fly past, fly past. What am I becoming?” For a lot of people, with the passage of time all they can say is, “Well, I’m getting older.” But if you’re practicing, you can have a lot of good answers: You’re becoming more mindful, becoming more discerning, more alert.
We do this through the practice by making an effort to buck the ways of the world.
I knew a Chinese astrologer one time who said she didn’t like doing the charts of people who practiced because they don’t follow in line with their stars. They go against their stars. Well, that’s precisely what we want. We don’t want to just get born, grow up, get old, and die. We want to accomplish something with our lives. We have to realize we don’t have much time, so we have to be heedful, given that today is going to pass. Tonight is going to pass. What do you want to take with you as a gift from today, a gift from tonight, to yourself? You want to have some extra capabilities, extra abilities.
Sometimes people say, “I want some nice memories.” But you know what happens to your memories as you get older. They get scrambled. But the skills that you work on—those stay with you. And the attitude you have to bring to make the skills, that becomes *ingrained *in the mind—that you’re going to be patient but persistent. You’re here to learn how to focus your desire for happiness on the causes.
In other words, you develop good habits. So when the Buddha asks you, “What are you becoming?” You can say, “I’m becoming a person of better habits.” That’s an answer you can say with pride.
So think about that every day, every day. What are you becoming with the passage of time? Don’t let time pass without gaining something from it. After all, it does offer you opportunities. It offers opportunities to be generous; to be virtuous; to develop good qualities of the mind. Take advantage of those opportunities. Time also provides you with the opportunity to spend your time chasing pleasures. But what do you have after you’ve been doing that?
As Ajaan Suwat used to like to ask, “The sensual pleasures of last week: Where are they now?” They’re all gone. What you have left are the habits you developed in pursuing those pleasures, which may not necessarily be good habits.
So focus on the habits that you’re developing. Each time you find the mind wandering off, you bring it right back. It wanders off again, bring it right back again. That’s a good habit right there. It’ll see you in good stead as you go through life and even as you approach death—because as death comes, your mind gets scattered all over the place. You want to make sure that you can keep it focused on the things that are really of worth, really of value, really are good for you.
So you can practice with that right now. Learn how to say, “No” to all the impulses that would pull you down—the impulses that, if the Buddha were to ask you “What are you becoming right now?” you’d have to say, “I’m becoming an old fool.” You don’t want that. We’re all getting older. But we don’t want to be fools. We want to overcome our foolishness. And the Buddha is showing us how.