Days & Nights Fly Past

Close your eyes. Take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths. And notice where you feel the breathing in the body. Where is it clearest to know that now the breath is coming in; now the breath is going out? Focus your attention there. Then ask yourself if long breathing feels good. If it feels energizing, keep it up. If it feels tiresome, you can shorten the breath. You can make it more shallow. Faster, slower. Heavier, lighter. Pay some attention to your breathing.

It’s through the breath that we move the body around. It’s through the breath that we know about the body. So it’s good to have the breath feeling comfortable. And it’s an anchor for the mind here in the present moment. When you’re with the breath, you know you’re with the present moment because there’s no future breath you can watch, no past breath you can watch. You’re right here, right now.

That way, you get to watch your mind. What is your mind doing right now? If it’s staying with the breath, fine. If it’s not, you might want to ask: Where are you going and why? All too often, we let the mind travel around, and we travel around in it without any clear sense of where we want to go. Just random thoughts come up in the mind—you grab a few here and there, and they pull you here, pull you there. And you wonder, to what purpose?

There’s a reflection that the Buddha has you make every day. He says, “Days and nights are flying past, flying past. What am I becoming?” What you’re becoming partly has to do with the fact that your body is getting older. When you’re young, it’s getting bigger and stronger. When you get older, it starts going in the other direction. But that’s not nearly as important as what’s becoming in your mind. And that’s determined by your actions.

So what kind of actions are you doing? Are you making yourself a more patient person? A more equanimous person? A kinder person? A more mindful and discerning person? Or are you going in the other direction? You have the choice.

This is probably one of the Buddha’s most important teachings, but it’s also one that gets most overlooked. Sometimes we’re told to just accept what comes, what comes, but the Buddha never said that. You accept the fact that when someone has died, they’ve died. You accept the fact when you’re getting older, you are getting older. But if there’s something unskillful coming up in your mind, you don’t sit there and just accept it. You have to get it out of the mind. You have to encourage skillful things in the mind, skillful qualities in the mind. And you have the choice. You have the power to do that. So make the most of that choice. Make the most of that power.

By being with the breath, you give yourself a good, comfortable place to stand in the present moment so that when something unskillful but attractive comes up in the mind, you’re in a better position to say No. And you’re in a better position to build good qualities in the mind so that as days and nights fly past, fly past, you are becoming a better person, a happier person.

As the Buddha said, if doing good things with your thoughts, your words, and your deeds didn’t lead to happiness, he wouldn’t have taught it. In other words, he didn’t simply say, “Hey, you have to do this, have to do that; you have to obey this, obey that.” He saw it within himself that when you act on skillful intentions, the results are going to be good. They’re going to lead to happiness.

So maintain a strong sense there is a connection between goodness and happiness. Again, this is one of those topics the world teaches otherwise. They say you have to cheat, you have to lie to get ahead. And happiness is equated with money. But is it really? Do we look carefully at the people who have a lot of money, have a lot of status, have a lot of power? Are they really happy people?

Look for someone who’s found some happiness and goodness, and there you’ll find someone who’s worth taking as an example, because that kind of happiness is solid. As you pursue that kind of happiness, you become a good person, so that you can give a good answer to the Buddha’s question.