Days and nights fly past, fly past: What are you doing right now? What are you doing with what you’ve got right now?

"“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 causal chain. Where are they taking us?

Even when you’re meditating, sitting here trying to do absolutely nothing, there’s still an action going on. There’s an intention. So what is your intention right now? Focus on the breath, get the mind to settle down. And in the process of settling down, learn to see what’s going on, to see more and more clearly what you are doing. The whole point of the practice is to get clearer on what it is to act. What does it mean to do something? What does it mean to have an intention? And in particular, which actions and which intentions are most skillful. Which words, which thoughts, which deeds are most skillful? Always look at things in those terms."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Days Fly Past (2004)"

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