Days Fly Past
July 28, 2004
“Days and nights fly past, fly past: What am I doing right now?” The Buddha has you reflect on that every day. The first sentence is for reflecting on how fleeting time is. Our lives are rushing—where? Rushing toward death, that’s for sure. When are we going to come slamming into death? We don’t know. So we don’t know how much time we have left, which comes to the second part of the reflection: “What am I doing right now?” You at least know that you have the present moment. What are you going to do with it? For the Buddha, that’s always the big question. What are you doing with what you’ve got right now? His teaching focuses on doing, on action. Everything we know is an action or the result of an action. Even theories are actions. Ideas are actions. Concepts are actions. They’re part of a casual chain. Where are they taking us?