Every Day at Sunrise

Every morning when the sun rises, the Buddha has you remind yourself that this could be your last day. What are you going to do with it? Are you going to spend it thinking about all kinds of useless things or are you going to try to train the mind? Every day at sunset, you should think the same thing: Tonight could be your last night. What are going to do with your time? Try to use it wisely, because we don’t know how much time we have.

We do know that the time is going to come at some point, and where we go after that, we really don’t know. We don’t know what our karmic background is. We can do a lot of good in this lifetime, yet there still may be some bad karma from the past. But when you have more mindfulness, more alertness, and can maintain right view all the time, you’re much more likely to go to a good place. But still, you have to be prepared.

So each time you breathe in, breathe out, ask yourself: How am I going to use this breath? How about this breath, and this breath? We have so many breaths that we feel we can throw them away. Yet once they’re gone, they’re gone; you can’t bring them back. So ask yourself every time you breathe in: What would be the best thing to be thinking about right now? What would be the best place to put my attention? What kind of attention?

The Buddha never talks about bare attention, or just accepting whatever comes up. He talks about appropriate attention, when you ask yourself the right questions about what’s the skillful thing to do right now, what are the unskillful things you can abandon right now. That’s the kind of attention you want to apply. And then with the next breath and the next. In that way, when the breaths go, you leave them behind without a sense of regret, without a sense that you’ve wasted your time, wasted your breath.

Then the days can add up to good days, not because of the date or the stars. These are good days because of the good you do. As the Buddha said, you ardently do your duty today, for tomorrow who knows what’s going to happen. Death could come. So do your duty ardently. The Buddha lays out the duties for you: to comprehend suffering, to abandon its cause, to realize the cessation of suffering by developing the path. Of those four duties, Ven. Sāriputta once said that the other three duties get done when you develop the path.

So focus on that. Work on your virtue, your concentration, your discernment. All good things, you can work on. If you sit around with time on your hands, don’t kill it. Use it. There are good things to develop in terms of virtue, concentration, and discernment. Even just one breath of concentration is better than one hundred breaths with a mind that’s been wandering around. So use your time well. That way, when it’s gone, there’ll be no regrets.